Leaves are stuck fast to the roofs of cars with condensation

Leaves are stuck fast with condensation to the roofs of cars. More leaves and a couple of energy drink cans line the gutter. I can hear a police siren, the noise of a train going through the cutting, a jangle of keys as a man unlocks the community centre and the wood pigeons calling from the beech on the edge of the wood. There are some more old mattresses in the front garden of the flats and a burst bin bag outside A-Z Tyres where the fuchsia had dropped its flowers in a neat purple stripe. In the park, a flock of gulls swoops low over the narrow gauge railway and the Canada geese by the pond stare at me as I walk past.

In town, the tail-lifts creak, the pallet trucks squeak and the drunks in the church gardens argue about which of them understands dogs the most. Above them, a fourth-floor window opens and two men lean out. One of them launches a paper dart made from a pizza menu. “What the fuck was that?” the other exclaims as it spiral dives straight down and crashes onto the pavement below.

Later, on the estate, a learner driver cautiously passes the boy of about eight who jumps from a four-foot high garden wall using a Morrison’s bag as a parachute and then rolls histrionically across the pavement.

I pass two untidy looking men with several missing teeth. They are leaning on the bins and drinking strong cider. “You look nothing like Postman Pat!” one of them shouts to me in a slightly camp accent.
“Do you not like my look?” I ask, "This high-vis is brand new.”

“It’s not so bad, you just don’t look like Postman Pat, that’s all," the man says before his attention is drawn to the tall woman in her seventies with the full-length woollen overcoat who has just come round the corner and is trying to avoid eye contact. “I love your coat!” he shouts after her. 
“Thanks, love,” says the woman, blushing slightly.

My neighbour keeps free range rabbits, chickens and guinea fowl.

My neighbour keeps free range rabbits, chickens and guinea fowl. She lives in a terraced house on a busy road with a small, paved yard. She often leaves the gate open so the animals can roam up and down the street. The first time I saw this, I assumed the animals had escaped and I knocked at her door to tell her. She waved me away and said it didn’t matter. This morning a fox was chasing one of her rabbits round and round the house opposite.

I thought I’d left for work about ten minutes late but I saw all the regulars in their usual places: The black VW Golf with the Polish plates, the silver Punto whose driver sits talking on the phone with the engine running next to the wall where all the pointing fell out in one piece after the bad frost, the 302 bus with the men in hi-vis jackets on board, the tall man with his brace of labradoodles who never says hello, the woman whose collies round up the ducks in the park, the former postman and his wife who say they couldn’t wish for a better lifestyle now he’s retired, the brazen blackbird that hops along at my feet for several yards at the entrance to the park, the disheveled starey-eyed beard-on/beard-off man with the jittery gait and his dubiously sourced early morning takeaway. Five Canada geese also flew low over my head in formation on their way to the pond.

At work, I almost hit a lorry driver who was wearing braces as he descended from his cab. I was distracted by the car park attendant who has taken to wearing a stab vest.

At the reception of the University halls of residence, the Mike Posner song You Think You’re Cooler Than Me was on the radio and, at the precise moment I asked Mr Hewitson for his name for the third time this week, I heard the lyric “and you never say hey, or remember my name. It's probably cuz, you think you're cooler than me.” If Mr Hewitson noticed, he never let on.

At the junior school office, I queued behind a woman with a budgerigar in her handbag (it had hurt its wing and she was only calling in on the way to the vets) and a man who was dropping his daughter off whilst wearing a Keep Calm and Eat Pussy T shirt.

On my way home, I stopped at the supermarket where a big fat man in a Spanish football shirt farted loudly by the turnips.