Things are slowly drying out in the first real sun of the year.

Things are slowly drying out in the first real sun of the year. Snowdrops and crocuses are appearing on the verges. The big woman in a dirty pink onesie on the bench at the side of the main road inhales from her cigarette with her eyes closed. She adjusts her posture, unfurling like an enormous pink, fleecy rose, stretching out her arms across the back rest. She tilts her head back to absorb the warmth of the sun on her face and exhales a long thin wisp of white smoke vertically up and over Lockwood Taxis.

Across the road, an old man in synthetic fibres rustles past the upturned pushchair. The sun has yet to coax him from his tightly secured drawstring hood, despite its low glare turning his Reactolite lenses black, opaque. His vision must be impaired because he almost bumped into the woman in the grey hooded top, black tracksuit pants and enormous pink fluffy slippers as she came out of the off-licence.

The estate is a spiky forest of broken saplings, TV aerials, and satellite dishes where the last of the  puddles reflect lowered hatchbacks and the dogs bark all day long. Somebody has drawn a half-arsed cock-and-balls motif in biro on the postman’s pouch box.

Half-a-dozen scruffy men on pit bikes systematically doorstep the residents:

“Alright, love? Just wondering if you’ve owt for scrap? Okay love… Sorry darling… Right love…”

A knackered white Transit follows in their wake, pausing outside the house with the bright blue plastic hanging baskets either side of the moulded Ionic columns in filthy, chipped UPVC. One of the pit bike men has discovered an old car tyre on the drive. He opens the Transit’s back doors and chucks it in.

Out on Hangingstone Road, a couple of workmen appear to be dismantling the CCTV gantry that sometimes gets mail addressed to it.* A long crocodile of primary school children march by. One of the teachers is standing with her feet either side of a large pile of dog shit on the pavement and is physically guiding the two-by-two children around it:

“No, Thomas. I am not standing in it, I am standing next to it! 

*On two occasions now I have come across mail addressed to: The CCTV Camera, Hangingstone Road, Huddersfield.

The Man Opposite Me on the Bus Kept Gesturing Towards Me

The man opposite me on the bus keeps gesturing towards me and saying "This postman, he is lost" in a fake eastern European accent. After a while his companion joins in too: "These sex toys are not for me, the brothel is not open yet" he says, also in a fake eastern European accent. They both find this amusing.

On the pavement below the pub chalkboard advertising a concert by a band called Rockweiler, there is a pillow in a clean white case. 

At the houses where they have removed the Yorkstone flags from the paths and replaced them with old Nurishment drink cans, empty Space Raiders/Jelly-Tots/Tesco bags, extrusions of expanding foam, splinters of 4x2 timber, fake patent snakeskin handbags with broken handles, pairs of black-tracksuit-bottoms-with-white-bits-on, faded-plastic children's ride-on cars with broken wheels, milk cartons, dog shit, old carpet grip-rods and empty lager cans, I disturbed a would-be burglar. He ran away up the cobbles wearing black tracksuit bottoms with white trim and his hood up.

The Polish man at No.131 who gets all the parcels has got some new BMW slippers.

I count seventeen piles of dog shit in the six square metres of concreted over yard at No.87 then I round the corner to find the man with the shaved head who lives at No.81 pissing in the middle of the street outside his house while his partner struggles to get their toddler down the front steps in a pushchair.

As I lift open the broken gate of the house with PRIVT NO PARKING PLS written on it in foot high white letters, the front door opens suddenly and someone hurls two fully loaded nappy bags roughly in the direction of the overflowing wheely bins on the pavement. They miss me and the bins by about a metre.

On the way into work, I followed a tall thin man in a hooded top down John William Street, his hands deep in his pockets...

Sunday, 2 January 2011

5.30am: I followed a tall thin man in a hooded top down John William Street, his hands deep in his pockets. He was obviously very drunk and on several occasions staggered the full width of the generous pavements and tripped off the kerb into the road. His attempts to maintain a respectable swagger throughout were comical.

On the bus, the man with the tidy goatee said he’d had to go straight to bed after watching The Bourne Supremacy: “I was fucked! What a film! It was even better than James Bond”.

I asked Martin whether he'd had a good Christmas. He said it had been a quiet one up until one of his neighbours had been shot dead by the police after a noisy twenty-four hour siege.

Crosland Street was covered in dog shit.

At the house with the incomplete decking and a broken television in the garden there was a sticker on the letterbox that read “If it's too loud your too old”.

Other stickers I saw on doors today: "Hello, Welcome. Now piss off!" and "My Rottweiler kills chavs".

A grey Renault Clio passed me at high speed on the wrong side of the road. It was followed by five police cars. The old man whose mail I was delivering said "Bloody Hell, Look at that!" and the old lady over the street waved her fist in the air and shouted something incomprehensible.

At a firm of engineers I delivered the mail through the door marked "Security and Fitness Centre".

Mr Smith was clearing up the mess in his driveway from where "the bloody fox has got at us turkey carcass".

Around the perimeter of Mr Mahmood's otherwise completely barren concreted-over gardens are arranged twelve four-pint plastic milk containers. They are positioned equidistant from one another and are three-quarters filled with water.

I could see a figure lying face down on the pavement...

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06.30am: I can see a figure lying face down on the pavement up ahead. I get a bit closer and I see his right arm move. He rolls briefly onto his side and back onto his front, where he lies still again. He’s wearing new, clean clothes: plaid shirt, dark blue denim jeans and expensive looking trainers. As I pass, I ask whether he’s okay. He rolls onto his side again. He’s young, mid-twenties, dark curly hair. “I’m just bored”, he says. “Oh, as long as your okay” I say. “Have you got a spare cig’?” “No.” “Okay”, and he rolls back onto his front.

I carry on up the road and into the park where a man of about sixty years old, Adidas trainers and shorts, is picking up the dog shit left by his border terrier and putting it into a little plastic bag.