7am, overcast, light rain: a flock of crows flies over the post office and lands in St Peter’s Gardens

7am, overcast, light rain: a flock of crows sweeps in over the post office and lands in St Peter’s Gardens. They wander around for a bit before flying away again, one pair at a time.

The thin man with filthy hands blags a cig off me outside work. He twitches and mumbles while he rolls it, “If it wasn’t for the postmen, I’d be lost” he says three times. “You guys are really switched on” he says. He pops his cigarette between his lips to light it. He keeps talking but I can’t understand what he’s saying because he has a cigarette in his mouth. He pulls on it, takes it out and tells me “I’ve got system…” and he goes on to explain how he likes to put grapes into cheap wine to improve the flavour. “It’s a good system but it’s nowhere near as good as yours” he says, and he takes a long drag while he gazes at the entrance to the post office as the vans go in and out. “That,” he says, leaving his cig between his lips again as he points at the busy yard, “that is SO switched on. That is SO switched on”.

Later, on the estate, I see a girl of about two or three years old sticking £10 notes to the condensation on the window of her front room. A few doors down, the Toyota Yaris decorated decals of flowers is surrounded on all sides by piles of the most enormous dog turds I think I’ve ever seen. Some are trodden into the asphalt and one in particular has a child’s doll embedded in it.

In the park, the trees glisten bright autumn yellow. The short chubby woman in the pink anorak and chullo hat strolls confidently past the leaf covered stone lion. She stops to pet the black Labrador accompanied by the woman in the gilet and jeans. “Well, you’re the boss, aren’t you darling?” The sun’s brought out lots of gilet dog walkers with their tennis ball launchers and leg warmers.

The bin man is wearing a kilt.

I knock at a door with a parcel. I wait for a while and am about to leave when a woman finally answers, “Sorry, love. I was on the loo.”

A gale sluices the first fallen leaves along the gutter

A gale sluices the first fallen leaves along the gutter and the man with the screwed up face who is jogging into the wind barely overtakes me. Brake lights cast the gates of the park red and a cyclist pulls over to adjust his gaiters. 

In town, the rough sleeping couple have moved from their usual pitch in the doorway of the pawnbrokers to the more sheltered entrance of the strip club.

In the suburbs, a wood pigeon perches on top of the new LED street light and the tired chubby woman at the show home says ‘Hello’ with long, roadkill flat vowels, rising and falling in inflection either side of the ‘L’. 

I say good morning to the man with the silver earrings, unzipped gilet, grey goatee and rat-tail but he doesn’t reply.

I struggle to read the dull screen of my PDA and the security man at the factory gates asks me whether it was made in China. “I’ve no idea” I say.

“Nothing they make works. They’re rubbish!” 

I point out that most of the manufacturing at his factory has famously been transferred to China over the last ten years. He looks sheepish, thinks for a moment and then says “All I’m saying is I’ve got a 1963 Massey Ferguson tractor and It still goes like new and it’s British made.”

On the TV monitor in the pro-shop at the golf club, a muscular American man with American hair and American teeth is playing golf in the sunshine with palm trees behind him and a heavy rock guitar soundtrack. He looks up at the camera to say he can’t believe how comfortable his trousers are. Meanwhile, the door to the shop opens and a short fat bald man with a grey moustache rustles in wearing a waterproof jacket and ill-judged shorts. He takes off the jacket, hangs it over the telly and wipes the rain off his glasses with a handkerchief.

It’s 11.30am and the smell of stewing meat pervades the estate of retired 1970s Britain. The narrow paths are cluttered with architectural features in UPVC. There are gates to open every couple of yards and redundant miniature porches that I have to walk backwards out of because there’s no room to turn around. There are unnecessary steps leading to raised beds of marigolds, box topiary, begonia, and there are swathes of hard-standing devoted solely to the display of miniature plastic fauna.

Two men are talking in the street. One wears his Hawaiian shirt untucked with the top two buttons undone, the other has Brylcreem hair, heavy black plastic rimmed glasses, and a purple nylon shirt tucked in to grey polyester slacks. They are discussing their experiences of electrocardiography: “It makes your arm twitch, doesn’t it?”

Inside the house, a woman in a dinner-lady tabard sits watching Bargain Hunt with her right hand clasped idly around the handle of a vacuum cleaner.

Swallows gather eagerly on phone lines.

Outside the flats, two men in their late sixties, wearing fleeces and woolly hats were discussing RSJ’s...

Outside the flats, two men in their late 60s—fleece jackets, woolly hats—were discussing RSJs, purlins and caustic soda. They were with a woman of a similar age. She was wearing large spectacles, red lipstick, and a well-padded, snug-fitting gilet.

A tall man with a shaved head stopped me in the street and said, ‘Have you noticed them?’ He freed up his right hand by consolidating all his Argos bags into his left and pointed at the sky.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Them,’ said the man, and pointed again.

‘The vapour trails?’ I said.

‘Yes. They’re not normal,’ he said. ‘Look at them. Look at the crisscrossing and the angle. They shouldn’t be at that angle.’ The man lined up his hand with one of the plumy trails, squinting across it with one eye closed to get a more accurate gauge. ‘They shouldn’t dissipate like that either. I’ve been doing some research; these aren’t civilian planes doing this, they are military. I’ve got software that tells me where all your British Airways, Virgin, Ryanair… all the Manchester airport stuff should be, but these planes never show up. I’ve noticed them a lot over Huddersfield recently.’

‘What are they doing?’ I asked.

‘Spraying chemicals,’ he said.

‘What for?’

‘I don’t know. If I told you what I think they’re doing it for, you’d think I was some kind of nutter.’ He smiled and re-distributed his Argos bags. He told me he couldn’t say any more because he had to go, and he legged it across the street shouting, ‘Just look up “Chemtrails” on Google. See you, mate!’ 

At the farm, Howard held up a letter to show me. Printed on the envelope it said: Give Blood – Donor Survey. Howard lowered his brow and growled ‘Survey, my arse! I’ll give ’em a bloody survey through the sights of my bloody rifle!’ On the way out of the yard I slipped on a pool of frozen dog piss.

Birds: Jay, Buzzard, Treecreeper, heron, pheasants.