Friday 14 February 2020

Someone has pushed over all the bins between my house and the town centre.


Someone has pushed over all the bins between my house and the town centre.

The snow storm passes and the sun comes out. The builder in baggy old jeans and beanie hat pulls up his van next to the high stone wall with the duvet of ivy slung over it. He climbs out and unseals a loaf of sliced bread with his teeth. He holds the top of the open bag in one hand as it untwists and then begins throwing one slice at a time onto the roof of an electricity substation.

Mrs Hicks has spilt something down her front. She’s in the kitchen window dabbing at her black and white striped jumper with a damp cloth. Behind her, at the kitchen island, Mr Hicks sits with his laptop open. In the road outside, a jackdaw is eating a flattened squirrel.
A Border collie barks at me through the gate of the big house on the moor. On the driveway, a man in a hunter’s cap and steel toe cap boots looks up from under the bonnet of an old Citroen Dispatch and shouts over ‘Oh shut up, you poof!’

The low sun heightens the green of the herringbone moss on the driveway at Shangri-La and there’s a noisy nuthatch at the edge of the park. Smashed tree litter lines both sides of the road, flotsam from the storm crushed by dog walkers’ cars.

At the firework factory, staff in hi-vis anoraks drive around in Land Rovers with no number plates.

On the estate where pretend owls outnumber the human population by two to one, the woman in the big 1980s style specs and Lurex knitwear is having some Double 4 Designer Traditional Vintage Cream Vinyl Plastic Cladding fitted to her gable end. A few doors down a woman calls me a knob and says she’s never been so shocked in all her life because of my ignorance of the arbitrary regulations she has devised for the use of her parcel box.

Saturday 1 February 2020

An extremely thin and roughly dressed man is pretending to walk an invisible dog



An extremely thin and roughly dressed man is pretending to walk an invisible dog as he crosses the ring-road holding a piece of string with a large rubber washer attached to the end. He casts around for a response from car drivers and fellow pedestrians but nobody is paying him any attention. A quarter of a mile down the main road, another skinny man sets off down the hill at an uncoordinated run. He stops suddenly, stands very still and straight on the kerb with his feet together. He composes himself for a few seconds and then pretends to perform an Olympic style high dive. He lands on his feet in the road, shakes pretend water from his hair, blows pretend water from his nose and raises an arm aloft to acknowledge the applause of an imaginary crowd.

Light drizzle, stiff breeze, overcast. Wind-blown leaves circle around the electricity substation. Above the trees, the crows are harrying a buzzard. In the trees, finches chatter and a woodpigeon hides its head under its wing. On the ground, the downy remains of a sparrowhawk kill line the gutter.

I pass the school where they have recently replaced one impossible slogan ‘a happy learning school where students exceed their potential’ with another, ‘Everyone, Exceptional, Everyday’. A few streets down somebody has created a large and unusual garden display. Dozens of succulents have been planted into sections of black plastic guttering and stuck to walls and fences with blobs of bright orange expanding foam. On the wall of the house adjacent to the front door, a collection of white pebbles of varying sizes has been attached using the same method. Next to the window of the front room, several flower boxes have also been ‘foamed’ to the house. These mainly contain spider plants whose leaves have been cut in half with a pair of scissors.

On the 1970s meat and potatoes estate, people wearing anoraks to protect themselves from doubt gather to witness to one-another in the name of The Powers That Be while plastic meerkats play on seesaws. The crows look on from the funny cypress trees.

The man who’s been pruning the big hedge leans on his broom and tells me about his holiday to Lanzarote: ‘We had a good trip round to see the lava where the volcano erupted and we had a meal. They cook you a chicken over the hole of the volcano and you can look down it. That was good and it was very reasonably priced which is unusual because you can usually only get a Coke for 10€ and I thought to myself, ‘That was a good trip out, that was’ but I wouldn’t really want to go again.