The elderly woman at the bungalow is pleased with her parcel of flowers

The elderly woman at the bungalow is pleased with her parcel of flowers. She briefly disappears inside to fetch a couple of Aldi chocolate bars 'Here you are, love. I’m so grateful for what you and your colleagues are doing'. I thank her and she tells me that she hasn’t left the house for ten weeks. 'That must be hard for you. How are you coping?' I ask. She bursts into tears.

At the flats an emaciated looking man in a 90s blouson tracksuit top and torn combat pants stops me. 'Scuse me mate can you spare me thirty, forty pee for summat to eat?' I apologise, I’ve got no cash on me. 'It’s all right, mate. I didn’t know you were the fucking parcel man.'

‘Is it for my nana? She’s been waiting for a parcel!’ asks the small boy ‘I don’t know’ I say, 'Is your nana’s name Jacqueline Smith?’ ‘Oh no,’ says the boy, ‘Her name’s Nana Jacquie’.

A man is walking towards me on the same side of the pavement. He’s wearing a grey hiker’s soft-shell jacket and trouser combination. I step out into the road to keep a social distance. He doesn’t look up from his Patrick O’Brian paperback.

It’s unseasonably warm and still. The asphalt outside the post office is melting and Mrs Woodhead is chasing a budgerigar around her front room in a bikini. Up on the hillside above the town there are fields of buttercups to the left and an elevated view across the whole of the valley on the right. Ivy and brambles grow along the dry-stone walls where the jackdaws perch unruffled by any wind. Elderflower crowns the overgrown verge-side vegetation; brambles, thistles, couch grass and nettles as high as the walls. 

I pass a woman hiking in an Aussie rules jersey with her phone on a lanyard around her neck. 

Phone cables hang from their poles like sound waves into the distance. A sun bleached road cone guards a hole in a rusty barbed wire fence where I say hello to the man with the Sebald moustache—or is it the postman from Mr Tickle? 

The hazy scent of summer swells; baking tree litter and fresh new foliage. 

Clouds wisp. Outside the hillside terrace, a well seasoned grit bin is almost buried in the undergrowth. The metal clasp on the lid has broken but part of the hinge is still in place and leached rust streaks the chunky faded yellow plastic. 

A chubby young man astride a stationary motorbike is talking to his elderly neighbour about the coronavirus. 'I’m not going back. I’m never using public transport again after this'. Further along, a man in denim jeans and a faded blue t-shirt says the view across to Holme Moss is stunning and I agree. 

A couple in their sixties sit on a bench surrounded by some unusually tall mother-die, she’s pointing out something on the horizon and he squints into the distance as two grey haired cyclists in lycra crest the hill.

In the village, a loud blackbird is singing in the big sycamore by the church, below it on the pavement are spatters of avian abstract expressionism. A big white cow lumbers down the sloping field in the distance towards the woman in the white vest top and coral pink shorts. She’s reaching for something in an orange bandolier style bag.

I’ve spoken to only four people in the last hour and a half. Just brief hellos to the young skateboarder in grey shorts and backpack, the young man with the big hair and nineties baggy skate clothes, the man in the pink polo shirt who was washing his Mercedes with a hosepipe, and the woman in with the blue twin-set and full skirt who was chasing her long haired corgi down the road because the paper boy had left the gate open again. 'You postmen never leave the gate open!' she shouts as she disappears up the path of the graveyard.

Jackdaws are chasing starlings and house martins are fighting over the old nests on the terrace. Among all the regular goldfinches, sparrows and robins is the first greenfinch I’ve seen for years as well a bullfinch, a chiffchaff and a spotted flycatcher.

Just as Mr Russell with the homemade automaton post box predicted it begins to rain heavily. His peony blooms have been flattened to the floor and there are petals everywhere. 

What were wispy flakes of sun dried leaves in the gutters are now a thick dark porridge and the rain is coming down with such force that it’s bringing with it a fresh green covering of foliage.

Later, in the baked goods aisle of the supermarket a man with a Roy Orbison lockdown hairstyle and purple flowery shirt fumbles in the pocket of his long-in-the-leg jeans for his phone. It rings loudly with the opening few bars of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. Over by the cooking sauces two members of staff are replenishing the Old El Paso Original Smoky Fajita Kits. 'I mean, did you see all the media outside his house just because of what he did for his child?' 'I know, it’s like who can honestly say, hand on heart, that they’ve not broken any of the rules.' 'I know, I mean it’s like, as long as you’re not stupid'.

It’s a bright morning

It’s a bright morning. A light breeze. A blackbird is singing in the sycamore tree above the nerf gun bullets in the gutter. Two furloughed men in polo shirts are talking loudly across an expanse of Luxury Artificial Grass—no mowing, no watering, no weeding. ‘It’s our lass’s birthday today’ says the one in the navy blue shorts. ‘Did you get her owt?’ Asks the other one in the navy blue shorts. ‘A shredder. She’s always shredding stuff and the old one’s broken.’ ‘Oh. Have you heard about Little Richard…?’

In the garden a few doors down the derelict trailer containing pebbledash concrete shed panels has been consumed by clocking dandelions and stinging nettles. Stuck to the inside of the window of the front room with sellotape, above the model of a soldier in a red tunic and bearskin hat, a glass union jack ashtray and a large woodpecker assembled from pieces of scrap metal, there’s a Thank You NHS rainbow cut from the local paper. Quite a large woman in floral leggings is bent over a large plastic terracotta-look plant pot with a trowel in one hand and a tray of seedlings in the other. ‘These are just gonna do one, I can tell.’ she says. ‘I can tell, they’re just gonna do one, they’ve had it”. A thin man in jeans, holding a cigarette stands over her. “Be careful, love” he says. ‘I AM being careful, they’re just falling apart!’

‘I think I might be pregnant’ says a man to his neighbour over a weathered overlap fence. ‘How come?’ says the neighbour. ‘I’ve been eating a whole cucumber every day these last few weeks’. ‘They’re refreshing though, aren’t they?’

The window cleaners are discussing the coronavirus with the occupier of the end terrace. He’s come outside in bare feet with cigarettes and tea “It wa' man-made, wan’t it? It wa' man-made. They’ve made it in a lab and it’s mutated, an’t it?” An elderly man shuffles past in salwar kameez, a face mask worn over his chin and bottom lip.

The new estate of detached period simulacra—all Jags and Range Rovers—smells strongly of the weed smoke that is pluming from the open window of one of the council houses that backs onto it.

“Wee wees! Don’t mess me about! Wee wees, now!” says the woman with the lockdown hairstyle to her unenthusiastic Border terrier.

Back out on the main road, a man in his 30s, flat cap over long hair, pool sliders under long jeans, liberates a large illustrated book about birds from the skip outside number two. Behind him in the road, a pristine scavenging jackdaw is wrestling with something wedged between the crack of a manhole cover and the asphalt.

Under the railway bridge out of the park and on past the walls and trees in ivy. Up the mother-die lined footpath next to the mid-century brick substation with the vernacular perches for tired witches. Above the tree-line an aerobatic hobby is after the new swifts and around the corner where the road starts again, local blues guitar legend and leatherworker George Gray is out for a walk in an ill-judged puffa coat.

6.25am: A warm draught of strong weed infiltrates the van via the open vent on the dashboard

6.25am: A warm draught of strong weed infiltrates the van via the open vent on the dashboard and the woman in the new KIA Sportage in front throws a joint out of the window as she pulls away from the lights. It’s a bright morning but it’s rained over night and traffic splashes through potholes on the road of mainly builders’ wholesalers. The pub on the corner where all the punk bands played in the 80s has been boarded up for years.

Later, on the edge of town where the Chinese students live, wheelie bins clutter the pavements—fourteen in one short terrace of six houses. I pass the Peugeot up on bricks with no radiator grill and the Lithuanian Mercedes with four flat tyres. I stop at each front door: white wooden, white wooden, brown wooden, white plastic, black composite, white plastic with scaffolding and a big pile household belongings on the pavement outside; three pull-along trollies spilling their contents into the road, clothes, books, a toaster…

On the estate on the moor, couch grass, dandelions and dock leaves have colonised the joints between the edge of the pavement and the kerb as well as the gaps between the kerb and the asphalt of the road; neat double rows of foot high pioneer vegetation line the Avenues, Closes, Rises and Crescents.

A gang of kids on bikes swarm around my van (they’re not doing social distancing around here), one of them opens the back doors and when I slam them shut again I am threatened. “I’LL SMASH YOUR FUCKING STUPID FACE AND BREAK THOSE FUCKING STUPID GLASSES” says the oldest of them, probably about sixteen.

An elderly couple are out for their lockdown walk. The woman—purple anorak and grey trousers—waits patiently for the man—washed out black anorak, walking stick. He’s stopped to inspect the planning notice which is cable tied to the lamp post opposite the post office.

Many years ago I would relieve the monotony of my post round by performing it in the style of somebody else. One of the personas I adopted was that of a weather-beaten old hill farmer from somewhere up on the moors. I would shout Eyup! to people and go on about how I was a bit nesh or say it was looking black over Bill’s mother’s. It occurs to me now that I pretty much do my round like that for real these days. It’s like that bit in Colditz where Wing Commander Marsh tries to trick the guards by feigning insanity but actually goes mad in the process.

There are goldfinches in the broken cherry and a blackbird is singing on the summit of a forty foot Leylandii. Dandelions are clocking, the cypresses are yellowing with new growth. A flock of starlings is pecking around in amongst the buttercups in the big field at the back of the estate.

The man with the tidy beard is inspecting the not quite sunken enough lights of his herringbone driveway. Most of them are cracked. At the house opposite, with the bench press and a quad bikes parked on the plastic lawn, a drift of pink cherry blossom underlines the grey plastic fence.

The hi-vis driver is delivering trays of white sliced to the post office. The postmaster comes out in an Adidas baseball cap and an old fashioned looking shell suit top to sign the delivery docket. He reaches up to the driver on the raised tail lift and hands him back his clipboard. They thank each other with a small salute style wave and the postmaster walks off dragging his biro along the powder coated railings of the day care centre.

Back at the office, one of my colleagues tells me he thinks the whole coronavirus thing is a hoax anyway, he says the NHS is still functioning well below its capacity and the new Nightingale hospitals are all empty. Another of my colleagues shows me a film he shot on his phone of the UFO he saw hovering above his house a couple of weeks ago. I tell him he should show it to my boss, he’s an expert on UFOs. He says he was abducted by aliens from Pendle Hill when he was a boy.

It’s a cold, clear morning. The woodpigeons and magpies are backed by songbirds

It’s a cold, clear morning. The woodpigeons and magpies are backed by songbirds. There’s a red light down in the railway cutting, a fine misty drizzle. Forsythia. 

It’s 6.30am and the grey haired man in the golfing sweater is readying a Ford Focus for an early morning trip to the supermarket.

In the park the bins have been pushed over again—the heavy cast iron ones, and somebody has written the words ‘Ass’ and ‘Hole’ in large letters on the path with spray paint.

A small skein of geese honks in to land on the pond by the bandstand.

Outside the Tesco on John William Street, a pair of crows are eating a rat, they hop up into a tree as I approach and issue noisy threats until I pass.

A woman’s loud cackle echos up from the market place where the stallholders are setting up.

On past the pair of discarded orange ski boots in the cotoneaster next to the graffitied junction box.

* * * * * * * *

The chatter of jackdaws, the drumming of a woodpecker and a distant ambulance siren swirl around the 1970s village.

Daffodils have grown to obscure the faded Beware of the Dog sign at the house where the dog died five years ago.

At the off-kilter Victorian mansion, the recycling bins are full of expanding foam and the foxes have been at the rubbish again; litter is strewn down the driveway, paper and cans are trapped in the brambles. I pass the half derelict coal bunker, its scattered contents, and the unusual large orange shovel which is in a different place every morning. It’s like a crime scene from a Children’s Film Foundation film. At the overgrown entrance, the man in the high-vis vest and cargo pants is leaning on the wall. He rolls a hard boiled egg in his hands, picks off the broken shell and pops it into his mouth whole.

On the estate of semi-detached bungalows there’s a noisy dispute between two neighbours about a hedge and some pruning. Over the road, Mrs Norcliffe takes the opportunity to grab a bunch of dead flowers from the windowsill in the kitchen. She flaps outside to the bins in fluffy slippers and cardy. She’s all ears.

Coronavirus ‘Wash Your Hands’ posters are Blu-tacked to the windows of the school. In the carpark a young woman is loading a large brass instrument into the boot of a Fiesta.

I ask the woman in the bath robe and slippers, her hair all stuck up on one side, whether she’ll take in a parcel for her neighbour. “No” she says, “I’m just off out”. I try the next neighbour along, an upstairs window opens, “Sorry, love. Can’t answer the door. Suspected coronavirus”.

Out in the sticks, I pass pensioners out walking, pensioners on horseback, cycling pensioners in lycra and pensioners going into the pub for lunch. “I tell you what,” says the windswept pensioner in the car park with the bag-for-life featuring a close up photograph of some strawberries, “If everyone came outside in this sunshine, it’d kill it off”.

A big new BMW passes slowly, the driver is eating mashed potato from a tray in his lap with a stainless dining fork.

Doorstep diorama of the day: a VW camper van the size of a small toaster is dwarfed by the man in the colourful plaid suit whose cranium has been planted with crocuses. Between them, a small stone dragon is curled up, asleep.