Responses to being asked ‘How are you?’

Responses to being asked ‘How are you?’

Man, 50s, re-potting saplings. Jeans, t-shirt: All right, my man.

Man, 60s, digging up tree stump. Jeans, open neck shirt: I’ll be all right when I get this thing out.

Man, 60s, weeding driveway with long hoe. Bucket hat, jeans, t-shirt, face mask: Humphliphhtschts.

Man, 70s, painting small headless ankylosaurus garden statue with silver paint. Shorts, open neck shirt: Still buggering on.

Man, 50s, supervising building work. Jeans, plaid shirt, shooting vest, Stetson hat: Hello, How are you? Have you got a mortgage? Credit cards? If you’re anything like me you’ll pay off any debts… The shits gonna hit the fan… hyperinflation… they don’t care about the likes of us, they’re only interested in lining their pockets… to hell with you and me… you’ll be earning a pittance… get your affairs in order… Pension? Ha!… I don’t know what it is, some people say I’m psychic but I predicted this… global currency reset… neo-liberal conspiracy… Fact, the coronavirus was created in a lab in China… Venezuela… Are you a bit of a prepper too?

I pass the laughing gas canisters and the empty packets of balloons on the pavement and turn up the cul-de-sac of detached mid-century bungalows. ‘Just leave it on the step. It’ll be safe. We don’t have any problems round here’ says the man in the open neck shirt and bucket hat. At the house thirty yards back down the main road the signs on the gate read THIS PROPERTY IS UNDER CONSTANT SURVEILLANCE CCTV and BEWARE OF DOG DO NOT ENTER.

Two white men in their 60s in front of me in the queue are reading racist memes to each other from their phones. After four failed attempts at pronouncing the word democracy the fat one in the big shorts gives up suddenly when his black friend comes to join them.

Everything people said to me on the estate today

Where’s the other one?*

Where’s he gone?*

Bye, thanks luvvie

Thanks, love

Pop it on the bin there

Thanks, love 

Where’s the other one?*

Cheers, thanks a lot

She’ll not bother you, she’ll lick you to death. I had to train her myself with a chair and a whip

Nice day for it

Never mind him, through here

Is he off all week? I hope it pisses down*

Are you coming here?

If it’s a bill you can keep it

As long as you’re not using it as a shortcut. People do. Not allowed.

Isn’t it warm

Thank you, thank you very much

*Reference to the usual postman whose delivery I was covering.

On the ridge tiles above the 1:6 scale Laurel and Hardy and the twice life-size rabbit

On the ridge tiles above the 1:6 scale Laurel and Hardy and the twice life-size rabbit, I notice a heron surveying the sleepy bungaloid exension. I point it out to the man with the hosepipe and he tells me it’s been kicking about for days.

It’s the season of sunny pinks and yellows. Dandelions, gorse, grit bins, double yellow lines and cherry blossom lined pavements.

At the house on the corner of the estate, the man in his sixties is admiring his new St George cross wind sock while at the bus stop in the road outside an elderly woman with a pull-along shopping cart pulls down her face mask to have a long drag on her cigarette.

10.30am. I park up next to the dirty Visitor Parking sign at the flats; scuffed brushed steel that still just about reflects the red of the van with a peeling inlayed sans serif in black. It’s come warm now and the bees are sniffing around the white azaleas. A man in a black baseball cap, black t-shirt and black jeans gets into a black Renault Megane. A large woodpigeon alights on the canopy of one of the neat new row of slender galvanised street lamps and a man in a Huddersfield Town shirt leans on a wheelie bin to sing the REM song, Losing My Religion in its entirety at the top of his voice.

“If their car’s not there, they’ll not be in” says the next-door neighbour. “Can I leave it with you?” I ask. “I suppose so” he sighs, not getting up. The cheery “Thanks, pal. You’re doing a great job” comments have dried up in the new normal.

The chemist has been broken into over night, the big display window and both panels of the door have been boarded up. A woman in her fifties is on her phone in the queue outside, “I’m not being horrible but you know what I mean.”

A man wearing a face mask in the queue at the post office waves and shouts a muffled hello. I say hello back. He says something else unintelligible. “Pardon” I say. He muffles into his mask again and I still don’t know what he’s saying so I approximate what I hope is an appropriate response, a slight laugh accompanied by a “Yeah”. His face his covered by his mask but I get the impression that this is a friend rather than a customer. I try, but I can’t make out what he’s saying or who he is so I just do a more open-faced laugh and a more enthusiastic yeah.

I pull up in the road next to two men in their fifties in jeans and rugby shirts. They are standing in the road drinking cans of Foster’s lager.

The man of about sixty in the full Watford football strip picks up his parcel from doorstep using a jumper to protect his hands.

A couple of early swallows whip around the telegraph wires above the house where they have pressed the cockpit canopy of a small aeroplane into use as a greenhouse. Next door, the young woman in leggings and dark glasses is on her phone, “If somebody in my household is ill then they can’t make me go to work. It says THEY CAN’T MAKE ME GO TO WORK”