6am: The weather is quick and breezy

6am: The weather is quick and breezy, tearing bright holes in the grey duvet of cloud. Slivers of blue come and go. Pavements are greasy from last night’s rain and there are puddles in the potholes in the road. In the park, Milly is chasing the tall thin man in the blouson jacket as he rounds the corner by the temperance fountain. She’s barking furiously. “Milly! Milly! Milly!” shouts the woman in the leggings. “She barks at that man every morning. It’s awful!”

The man with the spittle in the corners of his mouth and the pull-along flowery shopping cart stoops to pick up an elastic band from the path and reveals a portion of his arse. “I collect elastic bands” he says. “Oh” I say. “Yeh, for my nephew, he makes balls out of them and you can bounce them quite high.”

I cross the main road and head down the hill into town. The houses on my side of the road bristle with Sky dishes and TV aerials. Across the street there are none. Pioneer vegetation grows along the bottom of the Victorian railings and up the steps to the front doors of once grand townhouses. Outside the Stonebaked And Grill Just Eat Download This App shop, the weeds are above waist height all the way along the frontage. They obscure the view of the torn upholstery in the window.

An old camper van passes with One Life, Live It across the front and I wonder whether this sentiment had been on the owner’s mind during the time he spent badly applying the decals of moose and wolves to the back and sides.

The crash barriers on the roundabout are bent and debris from a collision litters the road outside the chartered surveyor’s offices. I’m High up on the flyover above the ring road I can see shafts of sunlight illuminating the rolling stock waiting on the railway bridge below. In the distance the wet roofs of houses glare fierce reflected white. 

A chunky bald man in a Huddersfield Town kit passes. He’s walking at great speed and the club crests tattooed on his calfs are a blur.

10am: Down by the Old Bridge a man in a black hoodie is walking backwards in the road, arms aloft, chanting incoherently and making provocative gestures at passing cars as they swerve around him.

At the mill, a man in a brown shop coat is smoking a cigarette outside, “Gi’us it here, it’ll be a pile o’shit anyway.”

Rusting metal uprights of a former fence top the wall around the big unmade car park—all puddles and hardcore. A large piece of rotten ply, the basis of a long gone sign spans four of the them, the rest are unoccupied except for the occasional straggles of impaled polythene which flutter like shit flags.

The pigeons around here are difficult to intimidate. They gather on pavements, hobbling about in packs headbutting the floor. I’m inches away before they finally put on a waddle or, if they’re half arsed, a scrappy two foot flight away from my boots. 

A train rumbles over the bridge as I walk underneath.

It starts to rain heavily and the thin man in black with wire-rimmed John Lennon glasses and neck tattoos looks out at the sky, “Rough weather fo’ thi” he says. 

The man wearing nothing but a pair of tight boxers and tattoos is very pleased with his parcel of Adidas trainers, “Respect. Respect. Respect” he says. “Can I take your name?” I ask. “Just put Daz. Respect”.

1pm: The weather brightens again. A couple in their sixties sit at the picnic bench on the green at the edge of the village. Behind them, their Border terrier is trying to get into the bins by the swings. It hangs from the aperture by its front paws, its back feet off the ground. 

A kestrel hangs in the sky off the road that circumnavigates the top of the valley, completely motionless for about five minutes, like magic.

A sparrow wipes its beak on a wooden fence by repeatedly scraping it on alternate sides of the top rail. Maybe I’m sensitised by this pandemic but I’ve never thought I might be putting my hand in some sparrow gob when I lean on a fence.

Doorstep Diorama of the Day: a distinctly cross-eyed owl in concrete next to a potted begonia, next to a small black and white painted plastic panda, next to a life-sized concrete squirrel with the back of its head missing.

I woke up early because every car on our street had been smashed up and broken into...

I woke up early because every car on our street had been smashed up and broken into—ours had been stolen. Luckily, it was only a dream.

I passed three piles of vomit on my way into work.

I was following a man carrying an overloaded Sainsbury’s bag into town. At the bottom of Fitzwilliam Street he wandered into the middle of the road and stooped to inspect a discarded Richmond Superkings packet. When he realised it was empty, he booted it across the road and continued on his way, rounding the corner under the railway bridge. As the Superking man disappeared from view, beard-on-beard-off man appeared, striding purposefully in the opposite direction whilst making a noise like a sheep.

I passed an old classmate in the street. I haven’t seen him for about twenty years. “Hi, how are you doing?” I said, reaching out to shake his hand.

“Not so bad” he said, and he pulled on his cigarette and carried on walking.

In the road by the school, the PE class were on a cross country run. The sturdily built teacher with her hair in a bun and white polo shirt tucked into black tracksuit trousers was berating the half a dozen chubby stragglers: “Power walk, C’mon! Put you arms into it! POWER WALK!

A white Transit van pulled up next me. The driver leant across and wound down the window. “Mate!” he yelled, “Which way is it back to where I just was?”

The man at No.1 has sprayed his letter box gold in honour of the Olympic Games. I posted his mail and, as I turned to walk back up the path, a sparrow flew into the back of my leg.

It’s been a few years since the last one, but I saw another headless pigeon corpse today.

A crow was pecking at the basketball sized piece of scrunched up fish and chip paper in the road

A crow was pecking at the basketball-sized piece of scrunched up fish and chip paper in the road. A car approached and the crow picked up the paper in its beak and flew off over the houses with it. Later, on the same street, I saw a woman in a spangly lilac sari and headscarf hoovering the pavement outside her house with big upright Dyson.

I was smoking on the steps at the entrance to the park opposite the post office with Michael. I told him about the woman I'd seen hoovering the pavement and he said he'd once seen a man watering his garden despite the fact he'd paved over it several years earlier. I suggested the man might simply have been cleaning the paving, but Michael said that when he'd asked him what he was doing, the man had said "Watering the flowers". At this point in the conversation, a sparrow flew down and landed in the gap between us on the step, about a foot away from each of us. Michael hadn't noticed it so I caught his eye, said "Ey-up, who's this?" and glanced down at the bird. When Michael caught sight of it, he started with a small yelp of surprise. The sparrow flew off and Michael said: "I fucking hate birds".

A group of school children passed me in the street. They all had their coats over their heads to block the glare of the sun on their phone screens.