DEAN, YOUR JOCKEY WHEEL’S ARRIVED!

“Oh, I didn’t know he’d ordered a jockey wheel,” said the big bleached-haired woman in the red shorts. ”DEAN, YOUR JOCKEY WHEEL’S ARRIVED!”

There’s a long cerise pink hairpiece on the stone steps up to Pip Hill from Albert Street.

At the house with the laughing terracotta Buddha on the broken patio, there’s a plastic Christmas wreath and a dozy looking vine weevil on the front door. The plants in the pots are all dead and two women in their twenties are sitting on the doorstep in their pyjamas, smoking. A black Mercedes Smart car is parked on the drive, its boot decorated with a big iron cross motif with Luftwaffe written underneath it in a gothic font.

It’s mild and overcast and the pervading smell is of liver and onions. At the house with the grinning miniature Easter Island heads I say hello to the man who is posting flyers for the local curry house into the letterbox that says No Junk Mail on it. He doesn’t reply. 

Next door, a three-foot pile of rubbish has accumulated in the garden and there are now fourteen sycamore saplings growing from between the joints in the cracked concrete paving flags. Arranged across the parcel shelf of the old Vauxhall Vectra on the drive, there are six nodding bulldogs wearing cross of St George T-shirts. 

The bin men ignore the bright yellow toilet with the wooden lid that’s been left out with the wheelie bins.

The thin man who is driving the car transporter for the insurance company is known as J-Dog according to the shiny cut-out foil writing in the window of his cab.

The man in the pastel coloured shirt at the Co-op is buying himself a Costa coffee. “I only need five hours sleep a night,” he says to the woman behind the counter, “If I don’t get it though, I’m as sick as a dog!” “I’m the same!” says the woman. “I just know when I’m overtired and I just have to go to bed.” “So you should,” says the man, “Nothing wrong with that! You’re like me.”

There’s a thrush singing in the top of a leylandii. 

A big forty-odd-year-old man with a homemade face tattoo pulls up on a child's glittery pink push bike with a flat tyre and asks me, "Have you fucking been up fucking New Laithe with a fucking parcel?” 

Five minutes later, an old Ford Focus skids around the corner. Three of the doors open before it even stops and half-a-dozen big men jump out, smash the front windows of the VW Golf parked at the side of the road and drag out the driver.

It’s dark in the park because they’ve turned out the lights to save some money.

It’s dark in the park because they’ve turned out the lights to save some money. There’s a noisy owl in the wooded bit and the man with the little round glasses says he’s fucking freezing.

It’s 1° and the frost is still hard when I pass the man in the T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops who is struggling to fit a baby seat into an old Ford Focus. Across the street a thin woman is forcing cardboard packaging into her overflowing bin, “Fuck me!” she says to the teenage girls who are listening to speaker-phone hip-hop on the wall, “When are they gonna come and empty the chuffin’ bins, man?”

Down by the No Fly Tipping sign someone has fly tipped a broken wheelie bin. 

At the bottom of the hill between the two derelict fridges, two boys of about eight or nine are playing kerby while another boy throws small stones at them. They pause briefly when the angry old man in the polyester parka poises a tin can across the street. He climbs into a black Skoda Fabia and drives away at high speed and the boys carry on with their game.

Next to the end terrace with NOTE PRIVT PlS DON’T THROW RUBISH HERE painted on its gable end in foot high lettering there are three sodden old settees, two armchairs, a stained king-sized mattress, a wardrobe door, four split open bin liners of children’s clothing in a puddle, a small pile of rubble, a large cardboard box, a bit of an old tent, an empty Pepsi can, an empty Persil box and some snapped off bits of rotten timber.

On the side street of semis, a tall thin man in a black fleece and beanie is trying to look nonchalant while his dog pisses on his next door neighbour’s gate post. He glances casually through the front window to check he hasn’t been spotted. On the other side of the road, outside the house with the plastic-terracotta doorstep plant pots of couch grass and Haribo wrappers, the woman in her 60s is being patient with her Yorkshire terrier as it shits on the pavement. She stands over it anxiously with a little black plastic bag ready in her hand. Further along, there’s a pride of journalists with woollen overcoats and long lenses blocking the road outside the house of the man who was shot dead by the police yesterday.

Back in town, the Sports Direct assistant idly plays with his genitals while he waits for the young girl to try on some trainers.