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.

On the pavement next to the junction box with “Kate is gay” written on it...

  

On the pavement next to the junction box with “Kate is gay” written on it, there was a pair of soiled boxer shorts and two smashed Stella bottles.

At the bus station, a group discussion about sandwich filling preferences was underway. The fat woman in her fifties said she could never eat peanut butter and cucumber because she doesn’t like “sweet and sour stuff”.

10a.m.: I found a pair of glasses in the street, thick old lady ones in a leather case. I knocked at a nearby house to see if somebody might recognise them, but there was no reply. I tried the house next door. There was nobody there either. I crossed to the house opposite and walked up the driveway past the caravan with the punctured leather football stuffed over the tow bar. I could see through the window of the front room and behind the display of beer steins on the window sill, there was a man on a settee with the television on. I knocked on the door but the man didn’t move. I rang the bell and knocked again, harder; he still didn’t move. I went to knock on the window but as I got closer I realised he was asleep. I didn’t wake him up, I went next door, where I could see another man sitting in front of a television. I knocked at his door and, once again, the man didn’t move; he was asleep as well. Eventually (another two doors down) somebody answered: a woman with short grey hair and a beige fleece. She took the glasses from me and said she thought they belonged to a neighbour. “I bet she’ll have dropped them on the way to the bus stop. She’ll have grabbed something out of her bag...” said the woman, twisting round and miming grabbing something from an imaginary bag, “...she’ll have yanked at it and pulled her glasses out by mistake. Thanks love, I’ll bob over with them when she gets back”.

At the school, a boy of about nine years old jumped in front of me and shouted, “Hello, random post guy!”

Just down from the yellow grit bin that’s overgrown with nettles and Mrs Lister’s Clematis—where Dick got a nail in his foot—an elderly couple were waiting for me to pull up in my van. He was wearing head-to-toe beige and she was in head-to-toe pale lavender. Both also wore reactolite glasses which were in full anti-glare bloom. 

“Anything exciting for us!” shouted the lavender lady as I got out.
“No. Next door” I said.
“You want to get a coat” said the man “They’re very good those fleeces but they don’t keep out the rain!”

According to the poster on the lamp-post, the cat with the bit of tinsel around its neck is still missing.