2014 has been a great year for holding a digestive biscuit between your teeth.

2014 Highlights:

Holding a digestive biscuit between your teeth while you watch a flock of geese

Laying some new, yellow concrete flags directly over the old cracked ones

Having a bit of cake on your face

Selling the stone flags from your yard and replacing them with dog shit

Poking a yolky knife at a picture of a semi-naked man

Amplexus on the steps of the house that once featured on TV’s Grand Designs programme

Emptying your catheter bag into the storm drain by the bedroom furniture shop

Adjusting your vest top and putting out your cigarette (as a mark of respect)

Asserting that steam railways make life worth living

Watching two ducks eat some chips

Being a goth, then normal, then a muslim

Spraying an old push-bike yellow in the rain

Mending a Transit Connect

Sleeping in a shopping basket attached to a walking frame

Cycling

Referring to your Mercedes using the pronouns She and Her
Returning to the crew cut and rat tail in your 60s

Asking Robert: Have you any food on?

Calling Robert a robbing bastard

Gobbing out of the window of a Fiat 500

Having your tits grabbed by Kyle

Recommending a cut of pork loin

Selling a pebble for a pound

Being inside a Range Rover

Swallowing a mouse in just three gulps

Being important enough in Fair-Isle and corduroy

Watching the jackdaws while you piss against a tree

Nightclothes in the daytime

Polishing your alloys and smoking weed

Soiled nappies and an enraged goose

Jokes and cigarettes outside the strip club

Wearing your hard hat over your hood

Talking to the lonely pig on the moor

Bemoaning all this rigmarole

A grey Vauxhall Zafira pulled up on the canal bank next to the narrowboat with the big spotlights

A grey Vauxhall Zafira pulls up on the canal bank next to the narrowboat with the big spotlights—just down from where they pulled the dead paedophile out of the water in the Christmas holidays. A man gets out and sweeps half a dozen McDonalds take-out cups from the footwell and onto the towpath. He brushes crumbs from his fleece jacket and boot-cut jeans, stretches, gets back into the car and drives away.

The shadows of the people in the bus queue are long. The man I used to think looked too young to smoke a pipe is there, smoking a pipe. He doesn’t look too young anymore. On the wall beside the shelter, someone has written ‘I know’ with a marker pen.

Hundreds of geese fly over in a noisy quarter-mile ‘V’ formation. The white UPVC front door of the house opposite opens, the one with the fake leaded lights in the shape of a Yorkshire rose, and Mr Mohammed steps outside in salwar kameez and sandals. He stands next to the soggy carpet in his front yard and looks up at the birds, shielding his eyes from the sun. Next door, the man in the torn gilet and jeans has also heard the noise and comes outside. He leans on his door frame holding a mug of tea in one hand, shielding his eyes with the other, his digestive biscuit held between his teeth. The two men stare up at the birds until they’ve all passed, briefly acknowledge one another and then go back inside, closing their front doors in unison.