Bobbing and Weaving to Focus my Specs on the Sign Warning me of the Aggressive Dog.

Bobbing and weaving to focus my specs on the sign warning me of the aggressive dog that will “definitely bite” I step backwards into a pile of shit.

On the rare occasions that the cold swirling wind dies down it’s quite warm. The cloud cover is not particularly thick, just thick enough to keep the sun from getting through. The wind is whistling through the plastic topiary of the Burton bubble. The innards of the steel lampposts chime against their casings. “Good morning!” Shouts the man in the puffer jacket who is walking a small dog. “Good morning!” I shout back as the fine mist of rain slowly coalesces on the lenses of my glasses and the jackdaws hide away in the belfry.

The life-sized plastic gorilla at the school house now has a baby gorilla sitting on its knee.

I follow the dotted white line of bird-shit that shadows the phone wire and continue up the hill past the apple tree with the shadow of mouldy yellow windfalls.

Above the roof tops in the village, a pair of crows are giving a big red kite a hard time. Directly below them, a man wearing a black gilet and grey jogging pants climbs into a Daihatsu Terios and drives away.

The wind finally dies away and the weather brightens. The couple in gilets who are looking in the window of the sweet shop have been reading out the labels on the jars to each other for about five minutes.

Young whippets, John and Trevor have tied their owner’s legs together with their leads next to the Peugeot 308 with the flat tyres. The big woman who is eating from a polystyrene container with her fingers is laughing at them from the bus stop.

Consecutive windowsill dioramas: 1. Two 4” high models of Castle Hill tower either side of a model of an African elephant of a similar height. 2. A 3” high brass pig (Berkshire?) 3. 12” high ceramic Egyptian cat. 4. Two 4” high ducks wearing Edwardian costume and a slightly taller statuette of Tobermory from the Wombles.

Donna Summer’s Dinner With Gershwin is playing across the shop floor at the Co-op. A man in black combat pants is inspecting a jar of hoisin sauce. He looks very disapprovingly at it, scowling angrily before tossing it into his basket and wandering off up the aisle singing. “I wanna have dinner with Gershwin. I wanna watch Rembrandt sketch. I wanna talk theory with Curie. I wanna get next to you. Next to you, yeah yeah”.

Walking into work at 6 a.m., I am overtaken by a man on an old mountain bike.

Walking into work at 6 a.m., I am overtaken by a man on an old mountain bike, a Labrador on a lead trotting alongside him. 20 yards ahead of me on the pavement is the spectral flâneur who I’ve occasionally glimpsed sight of over many years as he conducts his early morning dérives around town. He is easily recognised by his head-to-toe navy blue waterproofs and tightly drawn hood—whatever the weather. Over time I have convinced myself of this man's supernatural powers of perception and am consequently intimidated by his presence in the same street as me. 

Eventually, the mountain biker and Labrador catch up with and pass the mysterious flâneur which appears to prompt him to take flight; he suddenly leaps from the pavement, sprints across the road and disappears into a side street for another few months.

I have a badly addressed parcel to deliver: no street number, just a name. I ask the camp eastern European man with the tattoos who lives at the house with the waist height grass meadow in the front yard whether he recognises it. He says he doesn't which seems to frustrate him. I can tell he really wants to help and, after thinking for a moment he says, "The only advice I can give you is to drive really slowly along the road looking in all the windows at the curtains and things.”

It’s windy. I can hear plastic bottles blowing down the street. I see one bounce past the little junction box whose inspection door has been secured shut with brown packing tape.

Balls of plastic topiary hang from chains by front doors on the new estate. There are low maintenance bits of lawn, bits of privet, bits of cotoneaster etc. On a window sill, a pair of metallic effect picture frames display identical pieces of white paper printed with the words 4x4 Metallic Effect Frame.

At the house that smells of dog piss, there are signs on the gate that say Beware of Dogs. Next door, at the house where a recording of an Islamic call to prayer is audible from an upstairs window, there is a handwritten note in pencil attached to the door frame above the bell. It says “What are YOU saying?”

The sun comes out briefly and the broken glass glistens on the pavements. A scattering of takeaway detritus blows in a circle outside the post office where the couple with the bags-for-life are having an argument at the bus stop.

Inside the newsagent’s shop with the faded sign, a big man on crutches is talking to the thin woman in the torn gilet behind the counter. He is dressed in black with his hood up. He says Dr Who has had too many assistants over the years. “It started with his granddaughter and she was around for a while and then a new one came in and she’d be gone before you knew it and then there’d be another female on.” he explains, “There have been that many assistants it’s hard to keep up sometimes.”

On the estate of sweet peas and sticky grass, the 4x4 is loaded up and the kids are strapped in for the holiday drive. Parents scurry back and forth, “Have you got your fidget spinners?”

“Well, she’s putting enough weight on for twins,” says the waitress at the pub as she walks past the bar with plates of screwed up serviettes and ketchup stacked the length of her forearm. The barman glances up from his phone with a wry smile.

I pass The Bathstore on the ring road and I find myself thinking about the olive green plastic bath panel that was on sale for years at a rural post office from where I used to collect the mail. Other than post office essentials: stamps, envelopes, pens, there was nothing else for sale but this olive green bath panel. It was hung from baling twine above the cashier’s head and had a price tag of £18 attached to it. The office is long gone and presumably, the bath panel will have gone with it.

It’s raining, a strong breeze is swinging the phone cables and occasional gusts blow litter past me in the road.

It’s raining, a strong breeze is swinging the phone cables and occasional gusts blow litter past me in the road. I walk up the hill behind the man with the Viking hair and beard who is wearing pyjamas and slippers.

In the park, the big man in his twenties with analeptic leg shakes and an eagle print T-shirt is sitting on a bench smoking weed. He’s listening to some reggae influenced pop music on speaker-phone and his attempts to sing along elicit only occasional growls and shouts of elongated hybrid vowels.

Outside the care home the couch grass between the flags of the pavement has dried yellow since the council treated it at the beginning of the week. in the car park, staff in waterproofs sit on the kerb smoking cigarettes and drinking mugs of tea

I pass the garden where hundreds of small succulents are displayed. They are housed in dozens of planters which have been made from pieces of silver birch and attached to the rails of the perimeter fence with expanding foam. The big forty-odd year old man with the homemade face tattoo appears on a small child's bike. I wonder whether he's trying to intimidate me when he starts pulling shit wheelies in the road and grunting like a wild animal. He has a big gold chain around his neck and most of his arse crack is showing

Starlings squawk from the guttering

Later, on the semi-detached suburban estate where people wear Crocs to chamois their Skoda Yetis, the plastic topiary has bleached in the sun leaving it a psychedelic turquoise against the acid green of the fake lawns.

On the edge of the estate, the new owners of the farm house have replaced the broken Land Rover Defender and the piles of cow shit on the drive with a brace of high performance German saloons and a statue of the Buddha.

Windowsill survey:

A scented candle
A small porcelain model of a flower barrow
A porcelain goose and gosling
A ceramic lighthouse
A hedgehog ornament made from a pine cone
A basket of colourful silk roses
A small clay model of a terrace of houses
An ornamental statuette of a couple kissing, their intertwined bodies making the shape of a love heart.
A scented candle inside a small bird cage
A piece of MDF painted white with the word ‘Love’ cut out of it.
A vase of daffodils
A dead pelargonium
An empty jam jar
Two silk gerberas in a milk bottle
Two Christmas cacti
Two brass effect resin rabbit ornaments
An ornamental tea pot and kettle
More silk gerberas
A kind of imitation Fabergé egg on a gold effect stand
A white porcelain dolphin
A pair of ornamental statuettes of topless women holding tea lights
A glass vase filled with colourful glass beads and two silk gerbera
A book leant against the window displaying the cover: We May Not Have It All Together But Together We Have It All.
A boxer dog (a real one)

The Brexit bunting that decorates the No-Unauthorised-Vehicles car park is tangled and twisted

The Brexit bunting that decorates the No Unauthorised Vehicles car park is tangled and twisted, the few bits of it that remain free to flap, do so with vigour. At the house opposite, the woman with the cheesecloth blouse, enormous fluffy cat shaped slippers and the carrier bag full of soiled kitty litter is being followed down her garden path by an actual cat. 

It’s warm, bright and blustery. The man in his late 20s in the flat cap and florid trousers is carrying an aubergine and a tin of sardines to his BMW.

The driver of the Audi S4 throws a half-eaten pasty out of the window, almost hitting the woman who is walking past the Top Spot snooker club in knee length boots and a fleece jacket with wolf pictures on it.

I continue on past the sign that says Achieve Your Ambition Car Wash Open. Past the sparrow pecking at the base of the lamppost with gaffer tape wrapped around it to keep the inspection cover shut. Past the soon to be closed down museum that we all visited as kids—they have a stuffed waxwing from 1970.

The wheelie-bins on the new estate are the same shade of green as the fake plastic topiary in the gardens.

In the rubber scented car showroom, half-a-dozen grey haired customers in anoraks and shorts are sitting by the water cooler watching a wall-mounted television; a grey-haired man with swollen legs is being wired up to a heart monitor on the hospital channel.

On, into the village. It’s quiet apart from the blackbirds, the jackdaws and the occasional thrum of a 4x4. There are pansies, pelargoniums, No Cold Callers, Our Glorious Dead, goldfinches, martens, Sunday painters, misanthropic cows, and Slow Children Playing.

Later, back in town, a man comments that I have good legs for kickboxing.