The Rookery: rescheduled screening details.

The screening of The Rookery, a film I made for Hebden Bridge Arts festival has been rescheduled for 4.30pm on 5th September at Hebden Bridge Picture House. It is a free event. Trailer below.

On the Estate where Pretend Owls outnumber the Human Population by Two to One, there have been some New Editions.

On the estate where pretend owls outnumber the human population by two to one, there have been some new editions: a tiny little motorbike-and-sidecar with solar powered head-lamps, a concrete kitten, a miniature pretend-stone elephant—curled up asleep, lots of new meerkats and Buddhas and an entire garden stocked exclusively with faded plastic flora and fauna. 

The underlying murmur of people in tight shorts commenting on the warm weather to one another all day long is occasionally punctuated with the noise of power tools and the yelping of small dogs. 

Over by the abandoned Renault Camper, a man in his 70s is showing his new Teddy bear to the woman with pictures of wolves all over her T-shirt.

Further up the valley, outside the High School, the road sweeping man is picking up Maoam wrappers with an extendable litter-picker, soft-toy trophy-lynchings swinging from the handle of his cart.

The fine weather has brought out the clover, the daisies, the bird’s foot trefoil, the mother-die, buttercups, foxgloves, honeysuckle, and the old woman with her specs on a chain who shuffles past a pile of dried dog shit in her open-toed sandals.

Out in the sticks, a hen pheasant flaps out from under the five bar gate at the bottom of the field with the old bath tub in it and a Porsche 4x4 blows past with its windows open, trailing aftershave. 

Outside the village hall there are pots of marigolds around an old church pew with chintz cushions. There’s ivy, there are climbing roses, yew hedges, willow and birch. There are gravel paths with moss edging, potted geraniums and snap-dragons. There are spaniels and Labradors, and pairs of upside-down gardening shoes covered in lawn clippings. There is best bitter, and Radio 4, and Botox, and swallows and martens in the outhouses. Happy golfers wave me past the tee. The stolen top-stones have already been replaced.

It starts to rain summer rain, fat drops that leave big Dalmatian spots on the millstone flags. At the big house with the yellow lichen gables, the old man with the comb-over and frayed grey flannels is frustrated, “I’ve just come out to do a bit in the garden and bugger me if it hasn’t started raining.”

At the modernist house that is being extended using mainly large sheets of chipboard, the builders are discussing an episode of Top Gear in voices that carry.

“Wasn’t it funny when that caravan tried to overtake on the inside—on that bumpy bit?”

“You think we have a good laugh at work, imagine being them!”

A woman walks past with a big Siberian husky, then a jogger who is going barely fast enough to overtake her—he’s wiping the rain from his glasses with the hem of his Scotland football shirt.

The old woman at the farm asks whether I’ve got a mac in my van. I say I have and she gives me a double thumbs up and a big grin, “Well, go and put it on, I can see the blobs all over your shirt.”

Back in town the woman with the long-haired dachshunds is talking to the man taking photographs from the viewing point in the park.

“It’s gorgeous, isn’t it?

“Yes,” says the man

“We don’t appreciate it enough, living round here, do we?”

In the Close Humidity of Snapped off Saplings

In the close humidity of snapped off saplings, broken concrete, takeaway flyers, footballs in trees and trainers on wires, the dirty scrap man with the homemade tattoos is here for the Ikea bedstead. 

Two teens with half-closed eyes smoke weed while their Staffy intimidates the old Asian woman in salwar kameez. 

The shop is stuffy and smells of dog food. A young woman buys four bottles of Fruit Shoot, “I water them down but he still acts like a wild child, It’s a bloody nightmare!”

Further up the valley, in the open breeze and swaying beech trees, the Abel & Cole man buzzes around the laburnum, rhododendron, and the topiary box footballs in his tidy fleece jacket and yellow van.

The council gardener is sitting on the kerb mixing up some two-stroke in a jerry can while his colleague is on his knees lifting out dandelions at the base of the school fence.

A man walking a Cairn terrier passes me, “Are you lost?” he asks.

Litter Survey: Fitzwilliam Street to Church Street, via Greenhead Park, Heaton Road, and Branch Street.

Date: Wednesday, 17th June 2015

Weather: Warm, dry, still

Duration: 24 mins

Costa take-out cup.

Coca-Cola plastic bottle

Mayfair cigarette packet

Greggs take-out plastic cup

Richmond cigarette packet

Greggs take-out paper bag

Benson & Hedges cigarette packet.

Kinder Bueno packaging

Train ticket

7up drink can

Pile of indeterminate cigarette butts

Coca-Cola plastic bottle

Polystyrene takeaway container

Dairy Milk wrapper

Haribo sweet packet

Benson & Hedges cigarette packet

Wheat Crunchies packet

Richmond cigarette packet

Rizla packaging

Kellogs Coco Pops Snack Bar wrapper

Ribena plastic bottle

Benson & Hedges cigarette packet

Benson & Hedges cigarette packet

Expired DVLA tax disc

Capri Sun carton

Till receipt

Pages from The Huddersfield Examiner

Polystyrene cup

Capri Sun carton

Two ’wet wipes’

A child’s seaside fishing net

Mayfair cigarette packet (20)

Mayfair cigarette packet (10)

Pile of indeterminate cigarette butts

Coca Cola can

Costa sugar wrapper

Boost Energy Drink can

Pepsi can

Maoam sweet wrapper

Mr Freeze packaging

Rubicon mango drink can

Walkers Cheese & Onion crisps

Mayfair cigarette packet

Plastic fork

Polystyrene cup

Polystyrene cup

Paper serviette

Plastic water bottle (indeterminate brand)

A hair roller

Snickers wrapper

Lucasade bottle

Wrigley’s Extra chewing gum wrapper

Paracodol packaging
Lambert & Butler cigarette packet

The Postman Leans Against the Bus Shelter and Squints into the Squall

The postman leans against the bus shelter and squints into the squall, “As long as my fags and my phone are dry, I don’t give a shit about anything else,” he says.

Two ducks fly over the swathes of buttercups in the yellow meadow off Moor Lane.

“Are burglars poor?” the young son asks his dad.

“That depends on how successful a burglar they are,” his dad replies.

A pair of crows fly over the Ferrari, the rhododendrons, the brace of Range Rovers. They land on the ridge tiles of Wisteria Cottage with its gravel, its vintage boot jack, the stone pixies climbing over its gate, and its wisteria.

The view, like the cars and the houses around here, is massive.

There’s an angry bee trapped under the plastic envelope housing the planning notice that’s stuck to the lamp post next to the Toyota Previa with the long deliberate looking scratch down its side.

The man from Sunny View has come outside, hood drawstring tight. He tells me to get myself out of the rain.

I wonder if the little ginger dog turd left next to the imprint of a dog’s paw in the cement around the drain cover is a memorial tribute.

The old lady with the piles of books and the oxygen tank has died.

The couple who are always arguing with the windows open are arguing with the windows open. 

“Nice one, mate. See you later, bud,” says the young man through a haze of weed smoke from the passenger seat of the little Suzuki Ignis with the Ferrari air freshener hanging from the rear view mirror.

Later, the sun dries the rain and brings out the man who hoovers his pattern imprinted concrete driveway. Then there’s the man in the shorts and the rugby shirt who calls his Jack Russell terrier a knobhead and a tit.

The man in his 70s with the opaque reactolites and the black labrador stops to talk to the other man in his 70s with opaque reactolites and black labrador. They compare experiences of electrocardiography.

The roofers’ expletive ridden conversation is easily loud enough to be heard from the bus stop where the woman with the Sainsbury’s bag-for-life raises an outraged eyebrow.

What I thought was a bee in the pocket of my shirt was just a piece of tree litter.

The estate agent in the tailored grey waistcoat, jeans, light tan brogues and sunglasses climbs out of his black Audi S4. He grabs the large, strappy digital SLR from the passenger seat, takes a couple of snaps of the end-terrace with the pretend wooden front door and drives away again.

Back in town, I get off the bus and the Asian man who is wearing salwar kameez and holding a toilet seat is having a stand up row about parking spaces with a fat bald white man with no shirt on and ketchup around his mouth.

I leave at 6am

I leave at 6am as the low sun is glinting off silver seams of slug trail. At the junction where the double-yellow lines divert around the big sycamore, Jackson Pollock bird shit covers the road and the abandoned pushchair.

A funfair has set up in the park behind the row of big Dolly Mixture holly bushes. I walk past behind two other men in high-vis vests. “Do you know that guy up Deighton with one arm?” “Stumpy?” “Aye, that’s him, Stumpy...”

In town, I pass a noisy lock-in at the bar under the railway arches: "Setting the new standard of late night drinking culture."

I drive out into the country, where nightclub moguls and ex-football professionals have built big houses as high up the panoramic ridge as possible. They compete for the stripiest lawns, the most striking life-sized Buddhas, the shiniest black 4x4s, the most unorthodox use of decorative gravels and spars etc.

Mr Briggs pulls up in an old Toyota Yaris. “I’ve just taxed this: £60. Just insured it: £250.” That’s all he says. And then he drives away again.

In the village, this year’s flying ant day is underway and the builders are listening to heavy metal from the 1980s on a paint-spattered radio.

Back in town, a man with a chin-strap beard pops up from behind the fence of the residential care home. “Hello, mate. Do you know me?” he asks. “No,” I say. “Well, this is a residential home and I’m Wayne. I’m a bit autistic. I’m always thinking people are going to knife me. That’s no way to carry on, is it?” “No”, I say, and then add, “You should be all right at the moment, there’s nobody around”, and I set off walking again. Wayne shouts after me, “But I look all right though, don’t I?” I shout back, “Yes, you look fine!”

It’s one of those dry, still days.

A still day: petrol, cigarette smoke, lawnmowers, paper litter, traffic noises from a quarter-mile away, daisies, dandelions and daffodils, a peacock butterfly on white UPVC …

Out on the estate that hasn’t changed for forty years, an elderly couple are having a small tiff about which bag to put all those jam jars in while a sparrowhawk disembowels a small rodent on the ridge of their dormer bungalow.

Rockeries, cracked flag driveways, scuffed casey footballs, bikes on their sides, tiny weed bound ponds, bird feeders, overweight builders with broad accents, 8’x8’ lawns, cotoneasters, hebes, leylandii, a willow or a silver birch in the corner—planted by the developer in the seventies—low double-skinned fake-sandstone walls infilled with soil and alpines, brutal pruning, and a David Brown tractor spreading muck on the field behind.

There are women in their fifties and sixties: grown out bobs, Reactolite glasses, floral shirts, pastel vest tops, knee length shorts—also pastel. They sip gin and slim outside the pub waiting for Probably the Best Fish Supper in Town

The chickens in the field full of mangold wurzels are excited, they are singing Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance. There are lapwings, buzzards, and the nearly naked man walking the Border terrier who is singing at the top of his voice.

At the Back of the Bus:

At the Back of the Bus.

Woman in three-quarter length quilted anorak: You should have seen us roller skating the other night!

Other woman in three-quarter length quilted anorak: You weren’t kaylied as you were going round, were you? 

Woman in three-quarter length quilted anorak: Aye, the drunker we got, the braver we got.

Crisp shadows, blue sky, a starting of blossom with the shreds of newspaper in the trees, a weathered, grey wooden fence with the greenest cotoneaster leaking through the cracks, the second bullfinch in a week on Newsome Road South, rotten gates that fall apart in your hand, a moulded ‘stone’ tortoise with a solar panel shell and a night-light face, massive cars parked too close together, a woven willow reindeer which is still kicking around from Christmas…

Mr Briggs pulled over in his Suzuki Carry, he took his pipe out of his mouth and pinned it between the ball of his thumb and the steering wheel while he leant across and shouted to me through the window: 

“I’m off to t’bins; I’ve got a load of bloody rubbish in!”

That’s all. Then he went.

I saw Mr Booth outside the newsagent’s. He told me again about the time he went to see The Rolling Stones in 1980:

“Mick Jagger was from me to where that Renault’s parked... Margaret was on my shoulders... The car broke down on the way home...”

On the estate where people in bath robes often shout loudly at barking dogs

On the estate where people in bath robes often shout loudly at barking dogs above the noise of high-energy auto-tuned pop, they were shouting particularly loudly today. The wind whistled through the streets, slamming knackered garden gates, flapping and cracking at the polythene in the broken trees, and inducing that weird clanging sound from the inside of metal street lamps.  A man of about sixty years old, in a tracksuit and an old Suzuki Swift pulled over to ask me whether I knew where he’d been born. I said I didn’t.

“Sorry… I mean… the thing is, my wife asked me where I was born the other day and I realised I don’t know. My mum’s dead, so I can’t ask her. I sent off for my birth certificate and it says Storths Road but I don’t know where that is."

Later on, I heard a woodpecker — in the tree above the owl that’s made of hundreds of tiny shells.

The elderly man in the stained anorak was sitting on an upturned bucket to paint his garden fence. He told me he used to work for the GPO, “…on the engineering side, like. I’ve got a good pension — it’s seen me right! I’ve been retired for twenty-eight years. I bet it’s not like that anymore though, is it? I couldn’t believe it when they privatised the Royal Mail — Nobody wanted it! It was all just to line the pockets of the big boys. Greedy buggers.”

He dipped his brush into the paint,
“It’s water based, this” he pointed out.

I commented on the unpredictable weather we’ve been having.

“Aye, but isn’t it grand working outside. I love it. I always have. I think it’s why I’m so fit… apart from me knees… and me back. I’ve always worked outside. It can be the worst job in the world but as long as you’re outside and you’ve got some good work-mates it doesn’t matter."

I agreed with him, and told him about my back and knee problems. He sympathised and then parked his brush. 

“I’m going to call it a do for today,” he said, groping for a dry bit of fence to pull himself upright. “I’ve enjoyed our chat. It makes the world go round, doesn’t it? Talking to folk? But there’re some right miseries around these days, aren’t there? My bus driver says he hates his job because everybody’s so miserable now.”

Three doors down, a tall man in a black anorak and sandals was looking directly ahead and holding his hands behind his back as he paced slowly round and round the perimeter of the small concreted-over garden of his terraced house.

Sunlight streams through gaps in the clouds, dramatically spotlighting both the Arqiva Tower and Mr Hussain’s plastic lawn.

Sunlight streams through gaps in the clouds, dramatically spotlighting both the Emley Moor mast and Mr Hussain’s plastic lawn. The past few weeks have seen Mr Hussain’s fake lawn divided into a series of rectangular strips by the long mohicans of real lawn that have breached its seams.

Next door, a big gold two-litre Mercedes is blocking the pavement. I walk around it while the jackdaws squabble noisily on a chimney pot overhead. There are four stone urns in a neat row below the big picture window. Three of them house a corresponding stone sphere, the fourth contains a weathered, regulation size Mitre football.

Further up the valley, the houses on this estate haven’t changed much since they were built in the early 1970s; a series of brick semis with postage-stamp lawns bordered with daffs and primulas. The cul-de-sac is lined all the way to the turning circle with regularly spaced identical ‘feature’ bay windows, glazed with stick-on leaded lights. The wooden, approximately Doric architraves are rotting now and several have been replaced with moulded UPVC—as have many of the windows and doors—but all the brass reproduction Victorian stage-coach lamps have been retained. There’s evidence of the original concrete road surface through scars in the asphalt too. 

Audi, Audi, Ford Mondeo, Mercedes, Kia, Land Rover and, on the five-bar gated driveway at the bottom, underneath the leylandii that has been precision topiaried to accommodate it, a pristine, twelve year old Rover 75 Tourer in metallic red.

There’s nobody on the streets around here except for old women at bus stops and the occasional commercial dog walker. A Toyota Yaris goes past leaving a trail of weed smoke in its wake.

A shoal of jackdaws swells overhead...

A shoal of jackdaws swells overhead as the line of geese that are scouring the field off Storthes Hall Lane edge forward in unison like policemen in overalls conducting a fingertip search.

Ten years ago, the pair of plastic ornamental bay trees either side of the door were quite an authentic bay green but now they have faded and bleached to a washed-out toothpaste turquoise. In the garden, Mr Walker is making the most of the mild weather and is carrying out some maintenance. He has balanced the frost-severed head of the stone tortoise on top of a statuette of a baby rabbit. The head has thereby been raised to a height and angle that has allowed Mr Walker to realign it with its headless body and create the illusion that the tortoise is still whole. I can hardly see the join, and the result is a touching tableau in which the tortoise appears to be glancing over the baby rabbit’s back to keep an experienced eye out for predators.

The temperature is into double figures, shag pile moss covers the top stones, there are no clouds in the sky and the man in the heavy duffle coat with the hood up wants to know what the hell it is I think I’m doing.

“Come in! Come in!” shouts the old man at the manor house on the moor as I approach the door, “I hear you’ve grown a beard!” he says, mistaking me for somebody else.

A woman in a little hat with netty bits on waves to me from a passing Rolls Royce.