6am: the gutter is lined with flattened plastic bottles and someone is blowing their nose loudly on Fitzwilliam street.

6am: the gutter is lined with flattened plastic bottles and someone is blowing their nose loudly on Fitzwilliam street.

It’s a busy morning at the office and the pressure builds into a cacophony of infectious ticks, inflections, call and response catchprases and chants the origins of which have long since been forgotten: the name of a local chemical supplier is repeated over and over again in a fake cockney accent. The opening lines of the song Born Free are sung in the style of Matt Monro at an absurdly high volume. There’s a background of constant bickering punctuated with a mock shock “You can’t say that!” and somebody shouts “Do I look Stupid? to which everyone responds “Yes!” Then there’s the whistly “Oh yes!” In the style of a 1970s Deryck Guyler with ill fitting false teeth. At the height of the melee someone rattles a teaspoon inside an enamel mug to sound like an alpine cow bell and elicits Ski Sunday cries of “Hup hup hup hup!” And finally there are the loud self-mocking boasts “I used to work in the printing trade!” or “I once had trials at Oldham Athletic!” and the enthusiastic group response of “Failure!”

At the house with the stone hedgehogs on the doorstep, where the man sometimes hoovers his pattern imprinted concrete driveway, a crow takes off from the lawn with half a slice of bread in its beak. Next door, the goldfinches are twittering in the trees and the woman in the bathrobe is pleased with her parcel.

The woman in a vest top, gardening gloves and plaster cast on her leg is tipping garden waste over a wall while listening to Where the Streets Have No Name by U2 at high volume.

It’s quiet round here: cycling gear on the washing lines, vintage cars under the canvas covers, hedgerows under the ivy, woodpigeons in the cypress trees, pizza ovens in the gardens. People under wide brimmed hats flutter their union jacks on three consecutive TVs.

The sun comes out and a cloud of aphids appears, too many to avoid. They’re up my nose and in my ears. There are dozens of green specks on my light blue shirt. 

A man on his side is trimming the underneath bit of his privet, he breaks off briefly to say hello and to comment on “all these bloody greenflies”. His Nissan Leaf is plugged in for a charge under the drapes of the flowering wysteria and a couple of swallows chatter on the phone cables above.

Later, on the estate, an old Renault Scenic passes at speed with the windows down and the music up. As it passes one of the houses in the cul-de-sac its horn sounds abruptly and a flustered looking woman with a cigarette in her mouth and a phone under her chin comes running out of the front door in very tight leggings. She wrestles with the bolt of the definitely homemade double gates as the Scenic speeds up the road to turn around. She’s just about bounced the gates open and removed a stray toddler to safety when the Scenic returns and is hastily reversed into the muddy driveway by a man with an old fashioned moustache and apparently little regard for others.

“Get here now! Get here now! Get here now! Get here now! Get here now! Get here now! Get here now!” screams the large woman to the young boy who is running down the street. He rounds the corner and disappears from view and she goes into the house and shuts the door.

At the student halls of residence with the Brexit Party posters in the window, two young men with neck beards are drinking energy drinks on the grass surrounded by Nerf gun darts.

It’s Been a Windy Night ll

It’s been a windy night. A crow with no tail flies out from the bushes on the central reservation of the dual carriageway. It flaps frantically up onto one of the tall new LED street lamps. Down on the ground, a ginger Tom cat emerges from the bushes too, its mouth full of feathers.

An old Jaguar XJ scrapes noisily past with part of a tree wedged under its front end

A large McDonalds take-out cup is embedded in the ivy on the stone steps next to the chip shop. The narrow footpath down to the big house is littered with sycamore helicopters, small prematurely ejaculated conkers, and an unusual reddy-brown frog.

“The door is open”. The disembodied adenoidal woman on the control panel at the flats is unequivocal.

Outside again and a small dog attacks my leg and tears a large hole my trousers.

A sparrowhawk darts silently past at eye level before suddenly swooping dramatically upwards and into the tree where the woodpigeons have all been flapping about noisily. A blackbird sounds the alarm.

A trellis of clematis has blown over at the house with the sign on the gatepost: Beware of the wife.

A pair of grounded jackdaw chicks huddle in the undergrowth, blown from their nests in the night.

On, into the village where the aroma of cheap scented candles and accreted dog piss pervades. A large Cross of St George hangs from the first floor window of a brick and pebbledash terrace. There is music; too quiet to discern exactly what kind at first, but it gets louder: I Want to Break Free by Queen. An old Toyota decorated with badly applied decals of scorpions rounds the bend at the top of the hill and the music is loud enough to turn heads. The car skids slightly as it pulls up against the kerb. The driver waits for the song to finish before turning off the ignition, winding up the the windows and climbing out.

Beer bottles glint in the sun on the parched yellow verge.

A crow was pecking at the basketball sized piece of scrunched up fish and chip paper in the road

A crow was pecking at the basketball-sized piece of scrunched up fish and chip paper in the road. A car approached and the crow picked up the paper in its beak and flew off over the houses with it. Later, on the same street, I saw a woman in a spangly lilac sari and headscarf hoovering the pavement outside her house with big upright Dyson.

I was smoking on the steps at the entrance to the park opposite the post office with Michael. I told him about the woman I'd seen hoovering the pavement and he said he'd once seen a man watering his garden despite the fact he'd paved over it several years earlier. I suggested the man might simply have been cleaning the paving, but Michael said that when he'd asked him what he was doing, the man had said "Watering the flowers". At this point in the conversation, a sparrow flew down and landed in the gap between us on the step, about a foot away from each of us. Michael hadn't noticed it so I caught his eye, said "Ey-up, who's this?" and glanced down at the bird. When Michael caught sight of it, he started with a small yelp of surprise. The sparrow flew off and Michael said: "I fucking hate birds".

A group of school children passed me in the street. They all had their coats over their heads to block the glare of the sun on their phone screens.