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.

A young man wearing a yellow vest, faded red boxer shorts and fluffy yellow slippers...

A young man wearing a yellow vest, faded red boxer shorts and fluffy yellow slippers is sitting on my neighbour’s front step in the rain at 5.30am.

I see a fox on Station Road.

On the bus, I overhear a man telling his companion that he shat himself in bed after drinking too many Turbo Diesels in the pub.

Mrs Shaw gives me a bag of homegrown tomatoes. She says she’s completely self-sufficient as far as tomatoes are concerned.

Dr Groves opens his front door to take his mail. “It’s a reasonable day by the looks of it”, he says.

Mr Briggs pulls up to tell me he’s off to Oldham today. He pauses, then says “Actually, I tell a lie, I’m off to the office, then to Meltham and then to Oldham. I’m working on the precinct there, it’s a right bastard to park”. That’s all he says, then he gets back into his Suzuki Carry and drives away.

At the Chartered Accountants’, a chubby white male chartered accountant with brown plastic-rimmed glasses, a white shirt and a grey suit is talking to a slim white female chartered accountant in a white shirt and a slightly lighter grey suit. “Did you get through Chapeltown all right yesterday?” asks the man. “I know! I didn’t see a single white face!” says the woman biting her lip. “I bet you didn’t want to stop at the lights did you?” “No”, says the woman, “I pushed my door locks down!” She mimes twisting around and pushing down the door lock. “Absolutely terrifying”, she says. 

Mrs Gaunt waves to me from her first floor window with a tenon saw in her hand.

Places I’ve seen the Cross of St George today: 1. Painted across the bonnet
of a white baker’s van. 2. On a flag flying from a dead tree in a garden on Manse Drive. 3. On a flag flying from the Foresters Arms pub. 4. Painted on a drain cover by the back door of a house in Cowlersley. 5. On a flag flying from what used to be The Green Cross real ale pub but is now a Sex Encounter Club with blacked out windows and plans for a sauna.