The small grey pony is pulling the large brown pony’s mane and tail

The small grey pony is pulling the large brown pony’s mane and tail. Every so often, the brown one retaliates but it only puts the grey off for a few seconds before it starts again. They’ve been at it for at least twenty minutes. The butterflies are squabbling too (Are they squabbling, or are they procreating?)

Earlier, after I’d set off a chain of barking dogs by walking up Fairfield Rise, I passed the large woman in the sunglasses, vest top and tattoos. She was parked-up in a silver Astra making a loud phone call: “Gary only came out for a smidgeon, then he’s got back inside the house!” 

A man and his grandson are having a tetchy argument as they buff opposite alloys of a five year old Ford Fiesta. “Why do you keep saying that when you know it’s not true?” repeats the grandson for the third time.

In the sticks, old men in flat caps and short-sleeved khaki shirts drive immaculate ten year old saloons round the lanes, their wing mirrors thrashing through overgrown leylandii, dead flies accumulating on the plastic remembrance day poppies cable-tied to their radiator grills. There is honeysuckle everywhere.

Shadows are strong, the road is sticky and the weeds on the verges have turned to straw. Shiny men wearing nothing but shorts and trainers make busy noises. Past the derelict asylum and the road cone with the Greggs bag stuffed into the top, I knock off my hat on a washing line next to the parked milliner's van and the man at the bus stop, who is riding so low that his pubeless cock cleavage is clearly visible, laughs out loud.

The short but substantial man with the unruly hair, the sun visor...

The short but substantial man with the unruly hair, sun visor, T-shirt, cargo shorts—keys attached to belt—and steel toe-capped boots says “Hello, Kevin” as I pass. He props an old glass panelled front door up against the cellar doorway of the Working Men’s Club. I’ve got no idea how he knows my name. 

On the edge of the moor, at the end-terrace with the imitation stone grotesques on the garden wall, the imitation leaded lights in the windows and the imitation wood front door, Mrs Dyson’s bathrobe has blown from the rotary washing line, over the wall and onto the windscreen of the red Ferrari 348 that is parked in the road.

Around the corner, an indiscrete dope deal is taking place; a young man wearing a snapback baseball cap has double parked his hatchback adjacent to another young man wearing a snapback baseball cap in a different hatchback. They exchange small packages through open windows. After a couple of minutes, the double parked young-man-in-a-baseball-cap pulls up to the kerb, gets out of his hatchback and into the other man’s passenger seat where the two of them share a very strong smelling joint together.

I knock at the door of a house on Kinder Avenue and a large woman with a big grey overgrown bob, old fashioned tortoiseshell glasses, airforce blue overcoat (it's 25ºC), American Tan tights and a brand new pair of electric pink Nike trainers shouts from the garden next door that there's nobody at home. She says “I know they’ll be back around teatime because that’s their cat”, and she points to a ginger and white cat on the other side of the road.

Strong shadows. Stained asphalt: Oil, moss, blackened chewing gum, blobs of melted chocolate...

Strong shadows. Stained asphalt: oil, moss, blackened chewing gum, blobs of melted chocolate, strange bleached footprints, a criss-cross of tyre tracks in a patch of spilt concrete, lichen (Is it lichen or is it bird shit?) broken glass that glistens in the gutter, dust (not mud), the long dribble of white paint from the top of Orchard Terrace down to where that man is always mending his Volvo. The man who is always mending his Volvo has a sweat on today; he has ordered the wrong size cylinder-head O-rings.

Two filthy men in a knackered Transit pickup with old household radiator greedy-boards crawl by, eyeing the gardens for junk. The passenger, a skinny man with a torn T-shirt and a missing tooth, holds up a pornographic centrefold out of the window as they pass, "My bird!" he yells to me.

"Super" I say.

"My bird!" he yells again, even louder. 

There’s a swarm of long tailed tits in the park and, later out in the sticks, I hear a cuckoo.

At the building site, I am referred to as ‘Pal, ‘Bud,’ ‘Mate,’ and ‘Fella’ during the course of a single thirty second encounter with a man with pumped-up arms, a high-vis vest and a T-shirt with 5UCK MY D1CK written on it in a distressed sans serif with a drop shadow.

Down by the big new church that looks like a multi-storey car park, someone has discarded a pair of brand new trainers. They’re positioned in the middle of the pavement, a foot apart and slightly splayed at the toes, as if somebody caught up in the rapture hadn’t fastened their laces properly.

The missing cat posters that have been on the lamp-posts for months have suddenly bleached blue in the last week.

New website

By the way, I've built a new website out of some pram wheels I found in the canal.
http://kevinboniface.co.uk/KIB/Home.html

The noisy fracas among the sparrows in the hedgerow had been going on for some time

The noisy fracas among the sparrows in the hedgerow had been going on for some time. At one point it had been so heated that it had set the dog barking but it came to an abrupt halt when the woman in the niqab shuffled past, weighed down with carrier bags full of yoghurt.

Around the corner, a woman in her fifties with a bleached blonde perm and a pink towelling bathrobe was bagging up dog shit in the middle of the road. Another woman at the bus stop looked on. Seemingly caught out by the warm weather, she was sweating in her heavy quilted purple anorak with fur collar.

I was contemplating Mrs Begum’s lampshade—I’m pretty sure it’s on upside-down—when my attention was drawn to a passing young woman; her facial complexion didn’t match that of her décolletage by a profound distance. Happily though, it was a near perfect match for her flesh coloured leggings.

The thin woman in the skinny jeans was making a noisy phone call while supervising two toddlers in the park. “If they’re trying to take the piss again, they can kiss my arse!” she shouted, before breaking off suddenly to reprimand the children, muting the phone with her hand. “Hit her back! Fucking hit her back! Fucking hell, Jade, stop being such a fucking wuss!”

As the morning wore on, the streets filled up with massive men in enormous shirts eating pasties from paper bags. They mainly called each other "Pal" and discussed cars.

"You didn’t pay much for the Punto, did you?"

"Five and a half. Mind you, I only got five for the Audi."

Another bright sunny morning. I follow the chubby bald fifty-year-old paper ‘boy’

Another bright, sunny morning. I follow the chubby bald fifty-year-old paper boy into the newsagent’s where the man with the intense stare tries to sell me some honey roasted peanuts. “You wanna try them,” he says without blinking, “They’re proper nice, they are.” I refuse and, as I step back outside it starts to rain heavily. The sky clouds over and the temperature drops. I think about going back and buying the nuts but the rain stops as suddenly as it had started. it stays cold though and it's a full half hour before the Reactolite lenses of the people in fleece jackets go dark again.

Outside the church hall where I was once accused of smoking ‘wacky baccy’ at a wedding reception, the snow that had lined the kerb has given way to dried horse shit, tree litter and slug trails. Large men walk small dogs and large women talk at the bus stop: “I was supposed to be going to Diane’s but I can’t walk nowhere, I’m in agony.” One man’s heels are overhanging the back of his Crocs by about an inch and a half. Another man, who is having his lunch at 11.30 a.m., remarks, “Fucking hell, them Chinese give ‘emselves some right names, don’t they?”

I walk up the ring road behind two young men in washed out tracksuits. The taller one is walking a Staffordshire bull terrier on a lead. His swagger is so pronounced that he eventually builds up too much sideways momentum and stumbles, almost tripping over. To cover his embarrassment, he begins a vigorous air punching workout which results in his dog being yanked violently sideways with every right jab. The other man isn’t paying attention to his companion, he has half his arm down the back of his tracksuit pants and is scratching his arse while he wolf whistles at the girl in dark glasses walking down the other side of the road.
.

"Why would anyone want to punch a police horse?" asked the man on thebus...

"Why would anyone want to punch a police horse?" asks the man on the bus, glancing up from his paper. I say I don't know.

In Primitive Street, a gust of wind blows an empty lager can from one kerb to the other while two drunks are discussing the whereabouts of Jade. "Where is she?" asks the one in the faded blue anorak with the saggy pockets. 

"I don't know,” says the other, "she spat in my face about two years ago.”

A woman in her fifties in a T-shirt with a skull motif on it almost falls as she gets out of the back of a VW Golf before it has stopped. "Oh, yeah! Just reverse over me why don't you!" she yells at the driver before running across the road and slipping over on her greasy Yorkstone path. "Grrr! I'm having a really bad day!" she shouts as she gets back on her feet and rubs her hip. She opens her front door and an excited terrier shoots out and runs off down the street before she can stop it. "Now the dog's got out!"

Out on the new estate: fake-sandstone-beige and UPVC-white with accents of grit-bin and Cold-Caller-Control-Zone-sticker yellow. The background noise of burglar alarms, wind-chimes, squabbling blackbirds, shouting PE teachers and that weird clanging from the insides of swaying metal street lamps, is occasionally drowned out by the engine of the JCB whose driver is concentrating so hard that his tongue is poking out. The fake ornamental bay trees have blown over onto the plastic lawn where the high-pitched cat deterrent is repeatedly triggered by the swirling leaves and bobbing daffodils. 

There are sea urchins and highly glazed period folk on windowsills and solar panels on roofs. And there are dogs: people without shoes open doors while holding dogs by the collar. There are unencumbered and determined grey haired men in navy blue fleeces pounding the streets. Teeth gritted, they march up hills, arms outstretched for extra balance along uneven nascent desire lines—past the stalled mums with their hoods up against the drizzle, pushchairs and retrievers in one hand, they reach out for their straggling toddlers with the other.

I've seen waxwings and swallows within a week of each other.

In the street that smells of meat, the man who looks like my old headmaster was inspecting a discarded cigarette packet...

In the street that smells of meat, the man who looks like my old headmaster is inspecting a discarded cigarette packet while a younger man, who is smoking weed and wearing headphones does hundreds of keepie-uppies in the road.

On Easter Sunday some of the tenants of the flats were kept awake until 1.30am by loud music according to the handwritten note pinned to the front door.

I see Jonny, he’s petting the beautiful Burmese cat in Warneford Road. He says he thinks it’s so fine looking it could probably win Crufts even though it isn’t a dog.

The gardens on the evens side of the estate are still under deep snow. At number 36, only the top of the wheelie bin with the sticker of the tropical beach scene on it is visible because of the drifting. Outside number 12, an uncomfortable looking grey-haired woman in an overcoat and Reactolite glasses is waiting at the bus stop with three drunks who are arguing over a bottle of White Lightning.

Further down, at the house with the threadbare Union-Jack doormat, an elderly woman with a tomato stain on her beige duffle coat asks me whether I’ve seen the bin men. “I’m seventy-six years old” she says, “They shouldn’t do this to me. It’s upsetting. I put it out and they’ve missed me again!” I tell the woman I haven’t seen the bin men, just the Wheelie Wash man who comes along in their wake. I hand her her mail: promotional material from Boots about health and beauty products that can supercharge Your wellbeing. “I’ll not be needing that!” she says, “It’s going straight in the bin—if it’ll fit!”

On the main road, just down from the house called The Britvic at number 55, an elderly man with a pull-along shopping cart and thick plastic-rimmed glasses stops me. “He’s mad, isn’t he?” he says. “Who?” I ask. “That silly man from the government who says we can live on fifty-three pounds a week. I think he must be bloody mental! And that footballer! They’ve all gone bloody mental!”

When I get back to the office my workmates are reminiscing about a retired colleague who once reversed his van into his own car, touched up the damage with Dulux, and then drove to Blackpool to “dry it off”. They ask me whether I remember him. I say I do, but our shifts hadn’t overlapped. I used to cycle home in my trainers, so I’d leave my work boots at the office overnight where, without my knowledge, for several years, he wore them for the duration of his night shift, replacing them before I arrived for work again the next morning.

6am and light. The sky is cloudless apart from...

6am and light. The sky is cloudless apart from the gas flue vapour that leaks vertically from the houses on Church Street and the zig-zag trail left by a confused pilot above them.

I bump into Patrick again. He's wearing his unusual yellow overcoat and a knackered black baseball cap. He tells me he's been to the 24 hour chemist to get some medication. He says he has the flu and feels terrible—sweaty and cold. He says he's been coughing all night and that he threw-up at around 3am. I say the usual things, "There's a lot of it about... Get yourself home to bed... Sweat it out... You'll be right in a few days", and then he says goodbye and holds out his hand, I think about it for a second and then I shake it. When I get to work, I go straight to the toilet and wash my hands.

Later, with dry gravel crunching under my feet and the starlings gathering in the trees above me, I swallow my first fly of the season as two considerable ladies with brooches and belts and heavy foundation pass me in a fug of something heavy by Yves Saint Laurent: "I know if I get out of the hairdressers for quarter-past I'll be all right."

The Most Difficult Thing Ever at Huddersfield Literature Festival 2013.

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The Most Difficult Thing Ever at Huddersfield Literature Festival 2013.

On Thursday 14th March 2013 at Café Ollo, Huddersfield, UK at 7pm 
Details here: https://www.facebook.com/events/175985092548607/

And again on Friday 15th March 2013 at the Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield, UK from 6pm Details here: https://www.facebook.com/events/474398215947569/