2016 Highlights

2016 Highlights.

Red-top news, McDonalds bags, biros and notebooks.

Being deaf and only having one leg.

Steadying yourself on the bin for a few seconds.

Disappearing in a swirling cloud of evaporating dog piss.

Silk flowers in Costa coffee mugs.

Talking to the roofer who's never had a cashcard in his life, mate.

Purple anoraks.

Chamoising your Skoda Yeti in your Crocs.

Eating a pot of Muller Rice inside a ‘bang tidy’ Vauxhall Astra.

Playing on your Playstation in the nude.

Finding some suede loafers in your hyacinth bed.

Statues of Buddha, cigarette butts and stolen top stones.

Standing in the street in your bath robe sipping from a pint glass.

Running across the piss soaked carpet in the yard.

Hoiking your sweatpants out of your arse crack.

Drinking much more wine.

Displaying your Worker Wagg Beef & Veg Worker Complete dog food on some fake grass underneath a broken awning.

Mistaking a discarded Ramones T-shirt for a dead badger.

Broken drones.
Remembering Brian London, The Blackpool Rock.

Calling noisy teenagers ‘Dickheads’ under your breath.

Wearing shorts and shades to walk your tousled grey hairpiece terrier.

Checking out the Bailey Pageant Bretagne at the caravan showroom.

Decorating the ‘PRIVATE’ carpark with Brexit bunting.

Emptying the bins wearing a cheesecloth blouse and enormous fluffy cat-shaped slippers.

Carrying an aubergine and a tin of sardines to your BMW.

Throwing a half-eaten pasty from the window of your Audi S4.

Securing the lamppost inspection cover with gaffer tape.

Buying plastic topiary to match the colour of your wheelie bin.

Not being able to believe how comfortable your trousers are.

Stardrops, stewing steak and cheap tobacco at 11.30am.

Devoting swathes of hard-standing to the display of miniature plastic fauna.

Idly clasping the handle of your vacuum cleaner while you watch Bargain Hunt.

Not having a pay rise for nine years.

Knee-high pavement weeds.

Going to Cape Verde for a couple of weeks because you’re sick of this country.

Having a quick sniff of the nib of the marker pen before replacing the lid.

Upsetting the potted orchids in the miniature galvanised buckets.

Finishing work early so you can go and buy your girlfriend a watch for a hundred pounds.

Engaging in a loud debate about lorne sausage.

Contorting your face in unadulterated rage.

Waving your arms at the woman in the Fiesta.

Seven empty White Star cider cans and a plastic bag of dog shit.

Jogging in your suit trousers.

Slipping on a patch of rock salt.

Putting your foot through the slimy and rotten noughties decking.

Fried eggs, chips, beans and milky tea in the ‘Bistro’ with Margaret.

The recent spell of fine weather has brought other people onto the streets

The recent spell of fine weather has brought other people onto the streets over which the elderly women in purple anoraks have held sole dominion in recent months.

A dozen motorcycles pass a middle-aged cyclist as he rides through the village in lycra. He rolls his eyes and shouts to me above the noise, “Hell’s angels are out!”

A middle-aged man in Crocs is chamoising the Skoda Yeti on the driveway of the semi-detached new-build. The sun glints off of the plastic chrome while he whistles along to Bad Moon Rising on the car’s stereo.

The man sitting in the driver’s seat of the parked up Vauxhall Astra with the custom paint job, body kit, blacked-out windows, and ‘Bang Tidy’ sticker in the back, is eating a pot of Muller Rice.

Earlier, on the estate, I tried to deliver a parcel but was intercepted by a short middle-aged man with a grey side parting and a three-quarter length beige anorak. 

“You can leave it with me if she’s not in. She’s rarely at home, she’s a very active woman for a blind lady.”

I thanked the man and handed over the parcel.

“Could you pop me a note through, just to let her know I’ve got it?” said the man.

“I can,” I said, “but how will she read it if she’s blind?”

The man smiled wisely, “Sense of touch,” he said. Then he tapped his eye with his forefinger and explained, “When these pack up, the others pick up.”

“Oh” I said.

A small Asian girl with a snotty nose asks me where I’m going next.

“Over that way,” I say, waving my arm up the street.

“Pakistan?” asks the girl.

On the track down to the house where the men from Kudos Doors (Commercial and Domestic Door Systems) are working, I see a green woodpecker.

The blackbird I often see at the entrance to the park is perched on the gates for the second day running

The blackbird I often see at the entrance to the park is perched on the gates for the second day running. It doesn’t fly away when I pass. It watches me. I walk within a couple of feet of it today and it doesn’t flinch.

The sun is out, the sky is blue. There is birdsong: sparrows, starlings, a woodpigeon. Somebody is playing a trumpet. A car pulls away from the kerb and its tyres crackle and pop on dry asphalt.

A man of about fifty, wearing double denim and a black and white bandana tied around his head, is using the phone box that I’ve never really noticed before.

There is horse shit in the road. Further up the valley, there are boxy 1970s brick-built semis with white fascia boards that creek loudly in the sun. There are big picture windows. There are Astras, Minis, Astras, Beetles, Astras, Minis and Astras on uneven concrete and aubretia driveways. There are monolithic decapitated leylandii as big as houses. There are birch and willow, catkins and moss. There are two pieces of litter: an empty Muller Rice pot and a novelty shaped luminous yellow pencil eraser. There’s a Union Jack and a Get Britain Out of the EU poster. There are silk flowers

on the window sills. There are plastic lawns, footballs, grit bins. There are ‘moneysavingexpert.com’ A4 print-outs Blu-Tacked to porch windows saying ‘No Cold Callers’. There are whistling Eddie Stobart collectors in t-shirts smoking Marlboro cigarettes on hardstandings. They build kit cars and boats and take things to pieces. There’s the smell of machine oil. There’s the smell of cooking oil. There are chips. There are solid homemade repairs, gates and fences, washers and hinges, ironmongery, fixings and grease. There are guinea pigs in hutches and terriers on the backs of settees. Girls play at hopscotch and boys dress as superheroes while they mend punctures with holes in their knees.

A man insists I watch as he opens a parcel. Inside it, there is a small statuette of a blackbird perched on a twig.