The sun is low, boiler flues are pluming, the garden gate is slimy, and the old man with the eye-patch...

The sun is low, boiler flues are pluming, the garden gate is slimy, and the old man with the eye-patch, bandana, boot-cut jeans and biker jacket is bemoaning “All this bloody rigmarole for £1.63 in bloody pension credits” to his neighbour, the tall thin man in the plastic reindeer antlers with the dew-drop hanging from his nose.

All of a sudden hailstones are bouncing off the ‘Santa, Please Stop Here’ sign which is planted in the pot next to the fake plastic topiary bay tree.

A woman with an anorak and a bag-for-life is talking to a group of other women with bags-for-life. “I don’t feel the cold anymore because I’ve got...” she stops to think for a moment, then turns to the woman in the enormous scarf next to her, “What is it I’ve got, Joyce?” “Diabetes,” says Joyce. “No!” says the woman, suddenly remembering, “A onesie.”

The camp teenage boy is talking to his companion on the bus

The camp teenage boy is talking to his companion on the bus: “I can tell he’s got a crush on me but if I say owt I know he’s just gonna say ‘I’m not gay!’ in that stupid indignant voice”.

Behind me, the grey-haired hi-vis man has been to the new restaurant that apparently everybody is talking about: “I ordered the lamb but when it came it was all fat. I got one tiny thin slice of meat off the whole piece! I sent it back. I can’t eat that I said, it’s all fat. The woman asked me ‘Do you want to order something else?’ I said, ‘No love, you’ve put me right off my tea now, I’m going home to make myself some beans on toast.’ The chef chased me out into the car park and told me he was going to have word with the butcher but I’ll not be going back”.

I walk down Leeds Road behind a girl in skinny jeans and a black puffer jacket. She’s talking loudly on her phone in Polish, emphasising key points with wild, histrionic hand gestures.

There’s a woman in the Costcutter with ‘Nobody’s Cow’ appliquéd onto her onesie above her breasts. Outside, the man with the piercings is polishing the alloys of his Ford Fiesta with one hand while he smokes some strong weed with the other. He smiles and waves.

Out in the sticks, it’s all long shadows, wood smoke and lavender, starlings on wires, church bells, dried hydrangeas, Kate Bush songs from the open windows of ex farm buildings, wicker-baskets, wellington boots, a possible sighting of a small flock of waxwings and a definite sighting of a huge flock of lapwings.

There are plastic bags in the trees.

I was nearly hit twice by flying objects today: I had to swerve to avoid the soiled nappy that somebody threw from their front door towards the bins without looking*, then at the farm I had to duck under the flight path of an enraged goose. It hissed and honked and flew over the five bar gate at me in a rage. The old farmer ran out and got himself between the goose and me, flapping his arms at it. “It’s a right little bastard this ‘en!” he explained, as he tried to shepherd it back into the yard, “It dun’t like me either, keeps biting me. It’s never flown ovva t’gate before though!”

*This has happened before: http://goo.gl/edTd1A

The old man with the bag-4-life and the beige anorak didn’t have his hair styled in an incongruous mohican…

The old man with the bag-for-life and the beige anorak hasn’t got a mohican hairstyle, it's a shadow cast by the lamppost across his bald head by the low winter sun.

The sky blows from black to blue and back again: leaves, jackdaws, Tesco bags, starlings and fieldfares windswept under brief rainbows.

All morning, the police helicopter has been hovering above the estate where armed police are shouting at a man in a t-shirt decorated with distressed appliqué text.

At the other end of the road, the young woman with the big afro is reading a psychology textbook while two fat men in black satin shirts, elaborate tattoos, shiny grey slacks and light tan, chisel-toe mock-crocodile shoes carry large boxes into her house and call her darling.

A few doors up, a man with a strong eastern European accent explains from an upstairs window why he can’t open his front door, “I bought a couch. It is too big. I can’t open the door”.

The contents of the next house down have been dumped in miry puddles in the front garden: a pair of Ugg boots, a hi-fi system, a two-foot-tall vase, an upside-down sofa...

I park up next to a discarded boat and drink coffee from a flask while a man smoking weed with his coat only half on, takes his small daughter to the newsagent in her reindeer onesie.