A pair of deer bound along the back of the 90s estate.

A pair of deer bound along the back of the 90s estate. “Have you got a light?” ask the teenage boys who aren’t doing social distancing. 'No' I say as I round the corner. At one of the semis, a big jowly man with a shaved head walks up the path and a dog’s bark fractures the silence. The man responds with a much deeper, even louder bark of his own and the middle-aged couple in matching grey anoraks who are taking their exercise allowance quicken their pace. They head off towards the top end of the estate where the houses have Quality Driveways.

At the flats, the smell of dogs is masked with a cheap aerosol air freshener which catches in the back of my throat. I pull myself up the scuffed red vinyl concrete stairs two at a time, swinging around the stairwell on the wrought iron railings. The clatter of letterboxes reverberates noisily on the narrow landings. Back outside, a crow sits on the new LED street lamp above the Lynx deodorant gift box in the bramble litter trap. I pause to look out across the big elevated view of the deserted estate as the smell of weed drifts up the hillside and then I turn and walk into a spider’s web. As pick the sticky strands of silk out of my eyes and mouth I walk into a low slung washing line knocking my hat off onto the floor.

Past the mid-century RIBA award winner...

Past the mid-century RIBA award winner, the ivy clad tumbledown drystone, the elderly man exercising in Hushpuppies, the field of molehills, the Golden Cock, the lycra cyclists, the girl with the earbuds, the topless builder, the row of red brick semis, the neighbours who’ve forgotten about social distancing, the pulmonary pandemic silhouettes of bare trees, Julie waving from her van, the curtain twitchers who are relishing their new authority. 

“Just throw it over the wall, buddy!” says the man with a savage little terrier under each arm — both these dogs have bitten me in the past. I throw his parcel, “Stay safe, buddy!” 

I drive out to Storthes Hall student halls where in the autumn of 1979, my primary school headmaster and I delivered our Harvest Festival bounty. The imposing Edwardian building was a psychiatric hospital back then and some of the patients unnerved me. As I make my way up the driveway forty years and hundreds of visits later, memories of my headmaster's mark lll Cortina, the birdlike elderly woman who pinched at the sleeves of my coat and the dancing man with the dewdrop on his nose shadow my thoughts. This place, and the surrounding area will always be associated with that time. It will always be a creepy 1970s Children’s Film Foundation location with a Radiophonic Workshop soundtrack and there’s nothing my diligently objective re-appraisals can do about it.

I make my way down into the village and deliver mail addressed to the surnames of old schoolmates: Walker, Bowden, Wadsworth, Dyson, Armitage, Burgess, Cockroft, Hamshore, Battye, Booth, Haigh, Broadbent, Brown, Brook, Sykes, Gledhill, Holmes, Berry, Rollinson, Whitehead, Beever…

A man who looks like 70s Everton FC hero Bob Latchford is unloading groceries from the back of a Fiat Doblo but apart from him and the cat who is sleeping on the bin liner of garden waste outside number 31, the streets are deserted.

I leave parcels on doorsteps, knock on doors and back off to a safe distance like Mr Mackay at the school firework display.

“Cheers, bud! Stay safe, you’re doing a great job” says the man with the grey beard.

A woman’s voice, slightly muffled on the other side of a cypress hedge: “He says when the vaccine comes out he’s just gonna buy it and get us all done no matter how much it costs”.

Up the hill, past the farm with no doubt a very dangerous slurry pit, past the Miss Haversham gables of the old vicarage, past the jackdaws bickering in the belfry, past the postbox and the pub, past the field of lambs and mangold wurzels to the brick semis with the tongue and groove fascias—pansies in pots on the doorsteps. A landline rings from behind a glass front door. A man’s voice, “There’s people on at me who don’t even know when their next fucking wage is coming in…”

At the last house in the village, opposite the field where the dangerous geese live, the garden has been modernised; tiny squiggles of terrier shit glisten on the plastic turf.

It’s a cold, clear morning. The woodpigeons and magpies are backed by songbirds

It’s a cold, clear morning. The woodpigeons and magpies are backed by songbirds. There’s a red light down in the railway cutting, a fine misty drizzle. Forsythia. 

It’s 6.30am and the grey haired man in the golfing sweater is readying a Ford Focus for an early morning trip to the supermarket.

In the park the bins have been pushed over again—the heavy cast iron ones, and somebody has written the words ‘Ass’ and ‘Hole’ in large letters on the path with spray paint.

A small skein of geese honks in to land on the pond by the bandstand.

Outside the Tesco on John William Street, a pair of crows are eating a rat, they hop up into a tree as I approach and issue noisy threats until I pass.

A woman’s loud cackle echos up from the market place where the stallholders are setting up.

On past the pair of discarded orange ski boots in the cotoneaster next to the graffitied junction box.

* * * * * * * *

The chatter of jackdaws, the drumming of a woodpecker and a distant ambulance siren swirl around the 1970s village.

Daffodils have grown to obscure the faded Beware of the Dog sign at the house where the dog died five years ago.

At the off-kilter Victorian mansion, the recycling bins are full of expanding foam and the foxes have been at the rubbish again; litter is strewn down the driveway, paper and cans are trapped in the brambles. I pass the half derelict coal bunker, its scattered contents, and the unusual large orange shovel which is in a different place every morning. It’s like a crime scene from a Children’s Film Foundation film. At the overgrown entrance, the man in the high-vis vest and cargo pants is leaning on the wall. He rolls a hard boiled egg in his hands, picks off the broken shell and pops it into his mouth whole.

On the estate of semi-detached bungalows there’s a noisy dispute between two neighbours about a hedge and some pruning. Over the road, Mrs Norcliffe takes the opportunity to grab a bunch of dead flowers from the windowsill in the kitchen. She flaps outside to the bins in fluffy slippers and cardy. She’s all ears.

Coronavirus ‘Wash Your Hands’ posters are Blu-tacked to the windows of the school. In the carpark a young woman is loading a large brass instrument into the boot of a Fiesta.

I ask the woman in the bath robe and slippers, her hair all stuck up on one side, whether she’ll take in a parcel for her neighbour. “No” she says, “I’m just off out”. I try the next neighbour along, an upstairs window opens, “Sorry, love. Can’t answer the door. Suspected coronavirus”.

Out in the sticks, I pass pensioners out walking, pensioners on horseback, cycling pensioners in lycra and pensioners going into the pub for lunch. “I tell you what,” says the windswept pensioner in the car park with the bag-for-life featuring a close up photograph of some strawberries, “If everyone came outside in this sunshine, it’d kill it off”.

A big new BMW passes slowly, the driver is eating mashed potato from a tray in his lap with a stainless dining fork.

Doorstep diorama of the day: a VW camper van the size of a small toaster is dwarfed by the man in the colourful plaid suit whose cranium has been planted with crocuses. Between them, a small stone dragon is curled up, asleep.

6.00am. Driving sleet storms my waterproofs

6.00am. Driving sleet storms my waterproofs, cars skim through deluged streets, a noisy wagon sluices spray from the gutter and the thrush in the tree at the entrance to the park is singing so loudly I can hear him from Dingle Road, 250 yards away.

6.10am. Street lamps refract through the raindrops gathered on the telegraph wire which hangs across the road like a garland of fairy lights. Below, at the bus stop, the man in the smart black shoes, suit trousers and Parka jacket is smoking some very strong weed.

6.20am. Exposed on the flyover, I hold on to my hat as a train brakes into the station behind the derelict warehouse. A pint glass, three-quarters full of an artisan porter has been discarded on the pavement next to the junction box opposite the pub and, twenty yards further on, there’s a quarter full bottle of Coca Cola in an abandoned shopping trolley on Byram Street.

9.30am-13.40pm. Two dozen bleached plastic planters containing dry twigs, sweet wrappers and the odd new shoot guard the entrance to the flats. “All right, mate?” Says the man who is replacing the stolen top stones. Around the back of the back-to-backs, the top stones haven’t been replaced, neither have the paving flags. Deep mud abuts front steps. Miry bog gardens are littered with the smashed and filthy possessions of previous tenants; sodden mattresses, TV’s, plastic toys, clothes and the ubiquitous cinder toffee globules of expanding foam. The gloopy and blackened remains of a burnt out wheelie bin and its contents renders one house inaccessible.

Twenty yard litter survey:

A plastic takeaway box
A McDonalds takeout cup
The lid from a wheelie bin
A wet wipe
The wrapper from a Cadbury’s Fudge
A dented old fashioned galvanised bucket
A washing up bowl
Another McDonalds cup
A section of foam pipe-lagging
A Pepsi can
A parking ticket
Some foil packaging
Some plastic pre-packed sandwich packaging
An Oranjeboom can
A Budweiser can
A Kinder Bueno wrapper
A plastic bag
A Costa coffee cup
A cardboard box
An Irn Bru can
A burst bin liner and contents
Two unbranded takeout cups

“Fuck off!” says the thin man to his dog at the house that smells of piss.

A young man in a tracksuit refuses to take in a parcel for his neighbours because he doesn’t really like them. A few doors down, the stone Buddha sits serenely in the garden contemplating the upturned wheelie bin, the overgrown couch grass, the five deflated footballs, the three McDonalds takeout cups, the upside down three piece suite and the dog shit.

The window cleaner is sick of all this wind and rain.

The woman in the done-up-to-the-top anorak is sick of all this dog muck.

Mr Walker is sick of his next door neighbour.

I follow the thin man with the grey ponytail, too short jogging pants and undone safety boots up the main road. He farts loudly and repeatedly. 

The wind blows the lid from a green wheelie bin and it glances off my shoulder.

It’s cold and still sleeting steadily as I make my way up the long steep terrace. A dog is howling inside one of the houses near the top. A man wearing red and blue checked pyjamas and black trainers opens his front door. “Have you got owt for us?” He asks. “No” I say and he sets off up his path fixing some ear buds into his ears. He opens his gate and sets off up the road waving to the old man on the mobility scooter whose single very pale leg is naked almost to the hip apart from an open toed sandal and a pair of very short shorts.

Back out on the main road I pass the empty three litre bottle of Ace cider and the shuttlecock. The pavement is narrow, cars are parked nose to tail and the privet is overgrown; I have to lean over to one side as I walk. A fat man of about forty-five with a broken nose almost rides into me on a mountain bike with a too low seat. “Wooaah!” he exclaims as he slams on and skids to a stop about a foot away from me. We squeeze past each other. He doesn’t say anything, just rides off trailing weed smoke with his arse crack showing. An hour later I see him again, he’s going in the opposite direction this time. He swerves round a wheelie bin and hits the wing mirror of a parked Peugeot Partner.

Someone has pushed over all the bins between my house and the town centre.

Someone has pushed over all the bins between my house and the town centre.

The snow storm passes and the sun comes out. The builder in baggy old jeans and beanie hat pulls up his van next to the high stone wall with the duvet of ivy slung over it. He climbs out and unseals a loaf of sliced bread with his teeth. He holds the top of the open bag in one hand as it untwists and then begins throwing one slice at a time onto the roof of an electricity substation.

Mrs Hicks has spilt something down her front. She’s in the kitchen window dabbing at her black and white striped jumper with a damp cloth. Behind her, at the kitchen island, Mr Hicks sits with his laptop open. In the road outside, a jackdaw is eating a flattened squirrel.

A Border collie barks at me through the gate of the big house on the moor. On the driveway, a man in a hunter’s cap and steel toe cap boots looks up from under the bonnet of an old Citroen Dispatch and shouts over ‘Oh shut up, you poof!’

The low sun heightens the green of the herringbone moss on the driveway at Shangri-La and there’s a noisy nuthatch at the edge of the park. Smashed tree litter lines both sides of the road, flotsam from the storm crushed by dog walkers’ cars.

At the firework factory, staff in hi-vis anoraks drive around in Land Rovers with no number plates.

On the estate where pretend owls outnumber the human population by two to one, the woman in the big 1980s style specs and Lurex knitwear is having some Double 4 Designer Traditional Vintage Cream Vinyl Plastic Cladding fitted to her gable end. A few doors down a woman calls me a knob and says she’s never been so shocked in all her life because of my ignorance of the arbitrary regulations she has devised for the use of her parcel box.

An extremely thin and roughly dressed man is pretending to walk an invisible dog

An extremely thin and roughly dressed man is pretending to walk an invisible dog as he crosses the ring-road holding a piece of string with a large rubber washer attached to the end. He casts around for a response from car drivers and fellow pedestrians but nobody is paying him any attention. A quarter of a mile down the main road, another skinny man sets off down the hill at an uncoordinated run. He stops suddenly, stands very still and straight on the kerb with his feet together. He composes himself for a few seconds and then pretends to perform an Olympic style high dive. He lands on his feet in the road, shakes pretend water from his hair, blows pretend water from his nose and raises an arm aloft to acknowledge the applause of an imaginary crowd.

Light drizzle, stiff breeze, overcast. Wind-blown leaves circle around the electricity substation. Above the trees, the crows are harrying a buzzard. In the trees, finches chatter and a woodpigeon hides its head under its wing. On the ground, the downy remains of a sparrowhawk kill line the gutter.

I pass the school where they have recently replaced one impossible slogan ‘a happy learning school where students exceed their potential’ with another, ‘Everyone, Exceptional, Everyday’. A few streets down somebody has created a large and unusual garden display. Dozens of succulents have been planted into sections of black plastic guttering and stuck to walls and fences with blobs of bright orange expanding foam. On the wall of the house adjacent to the front door, a collection of white pebbles of varying sizes has been attached using the same method. Next to the window of the front room, several flower boxes have also been ‘foamed’ to the house. These mainly contain spider plants whose leaves have been cut in half with a pair of scissors.

On the 1970s meat and potatoes estate, people wearing anoraks to protect themselves from doubt gather to witness to one-another in the name of The Powers That Be while plastic meerkats play on seesaws. The crows look on from the funny cypress trees.

The man who’s been pruning the big hedge leans on his broom and tells me about his holiday to Lanzarote: ‘We had a good trip round to see the lava where the volcano erupted and we had a meal. They cook you a chicken over the hole of the volcano and you can look down it. That was good and it was very reasonably priced which is unusual because you can usually only get a Coke for 10€ and I thought to myself, ‘That was a good trip out, that was’ but I wouldn’t really want to go again.

A Caught by the River Social Club: Farsley

A Caught by the River Social Club: Farsley will take place at the West Yorkshire town’s Constitutional Club on Thursday 6th February 2020, and will feature:

- Stepping into the dark: a unique audio exploration of landscapes local to the venue by field recording royalty Chris Watson (David Attenborough’s right-hand sound man);

- Much-revered poet and non-fiction writer Kathleen Jamie discussing her most recent book, Surfacing, with Amy Liptrot;

- Kevin Boniface sharing comic snatches from his daily postal round;

- Longstanding Caught by the River co-conspirator and purveyor of vintage fishing tackle John Andrews as Master of Ceremonies;

- Caught by the River DJs spinning tunes ‘til close.

Farsley Constitutional is a former Conservative Club, now a self-professed “club for working persons” to which membership costs £1 a year.

Full price tickets are £10. We are also offering a suspended ticket option for this event - these are tickets which can be bought ahead for someone else, or, if you’d like to come along but can’t afford to pay, ones which can be claimed for free, no questions asked. Tickets can be purchased here. Suspended tickets can be claimed by emailing info@caughtbytheriver.net.

Highlights 2019

Highlights 2019

Hiding in the belfry

Climbing into a Daihatsu Terios and driving away

Scowling disapprovingly at a jar of hoisin sauce while singing along to Donna Summer’s Dinner with Gershwin

Having no teeth, a torn anorak and an old pair of espadrilles and hoping there will be loads of babes in bikinis in town

Standing on a dead rabbit

Wearing anoraks and generously cut poly-cotton chinos to browse the plastic crockery

Placing a small bag of dog shit next to a statuette of a meerkat wearing cricket whites

Baring your arse at the man who is smoking weed in the passenger seat of a Vauxhall Corsa
Blowing your nose on Fitzwilliam Street
Wearing a vest top, gardening gloves and a plaster cast on your leg while listening to U2 at high volume
Being irritated by the aphids that fly up your nose
Lying down to trim the underneath bit of your privet
Running about in tight leggings with a cigarette in your mouth and a phone under your chin
Drinking energy drinks on the lawn surrounded by Nerf gun darts.
Talking on your phone with a mouthful of raw carrot
Aubretia, boot jacks and botox
Being angry about a porch
Decorating your garage doors with Schutzstaffel insignia.
Hitting your Border terrier with a Farmfoods catalogue
Being racist in a three-quarter length floral print pleated skirt and very flat shoes
Rolling your eyes at the policemen in flak jackets
Defacing a pillar box with a backwards swastika
Asking Ernest whether he’s got his hearing aid in. “Sorry, love, what was that?”
Wearing a cardigan and a combover and not understanding touchscreen technology. “You need a new pen, lad. It’s run out of ink”
Jogging around the park in salwar kameez and diamanté encrusted sandals
Driving past the peace signs and the swastikas in your Porsche 4x4
Mucky Transit van roofs striated with the desire paths of molluscs
Discussing automotive design preferences while walking your Labradors: “Yeah, I really like the back of them, me”
Throwing an empty Relentless energy drink can from the window of your Toyota Invincible.
Shouting into your phone above the wind and the rain. “Get them big drawers of yours off! That’s what he said to me!”
Sticking slices of onion to your shirt with egg yolk
Feeding the hedgehogs with turkey mince and those big orange slugs
Doing your shopping before the shops open
Kicking down the front door of your own house
Wearing a bathrobe to argue loudly with your partner in your ragwort garden
Vaping on the tail-lift of a Luton van half loaded with broken wheelie bins
Collecting sodden cigarette butts on your hands and knees outside the pub in the rain
Waving a two litre bottle of white cider at the drivers of the cars that swerve around you
Sticking £10 notes to the condensation on the window of your front room
Kicking up water from deluged pothole craters with your pool sliders
Voicing your unsolicited opinions of the mayor of London while wearing a threadbare sweater with bits of dinner down it
A 1980s taupe and Burgundy velour three piece suite in a busy floral design

“What on earth is that?”

“What on earth is that?” says the elderly woman when she opens her front door to the florist with the pink hair. “Some lovely fresh flowers!” says the florist. “Oh Lord! What am I supposed to do with those?"

A plume of 2-stroke exhaust rises from one of the back-to-backs where two men in tracksuits are tinkering with a noisy pit bike. At the next house along, the front door is decorated with a pink tinsel wreath in the shape of a star. The cardboard tag attached to it says “Decorative Star £2.99.” A few more houses along, another large wreath hangs from a door; a ring of woven twigs and pine cones. Its postcard sized cardboard tag outlines its fire resistant credentials in several languages.

On the estate, the elderly woman with the anorak is tending her garden. I compliment her on her hedge which is red with berries. “Is it a cotoneaster?” I ask. “I’ve got no idea” says the woman irritably, wiping a dew drop from her nose with her cuff. “All I know is it grows. It bloody grows! And the berries go everywhere. If I could pull it out, I would."

Past the for sale board: Yorkshire’s Finest Properties. Past a flock of long-tailed tits in a beech tree. Past that thing on the telegraph wire which, from the corner of my eye, I often mistake for a starling. On closer inspection, It’s not, it looks just like the cardboard middle of a toilet roll but it can't be, It’s been there for years. It would have degraded to a pulp by now and why would someone have put it up there anyway?

The sad birch droops on the corner of the road lined on both sides with Vote Labour signs. 

On the estate of 1970s detached houses in fake sandstone there’s a flock of sparrows and a wood pigeon rustling about in the papery beech while a robin dives for cover into a cypress hedge. I knock at the house on the corner and a man in his 60s opens the door while holding back two agitated terriers. “If it’s a bill you can take it back!” he says. “I’ve got something for you” I explain. “Oh, have you brought me a turkey?” He asks. “I don’t think so” I say and I hand him a parcel. He consolidates the dogs into one hand, takes the package and holds it up to his ear, “Is it ticking?” I ask him for a signature but he doesn’t understand how to work the PDA and I have to sign for him.

Back in town, it’s pissing with rain and the rusty needle bin next to the chip shop is full of litter. Wet pulped paper porridges out from the aperture and drips onto the scarred asphalt creating a miniature lunar landscape of papier-mâché stalagmites. Crouched opposite, next to a deep puddle is a thin man in a dirty brown tracksuit. A young man in grey sweat pants and a hoodie approaches him, his pool sliders kicking up water from deluged pothole craters. He glances around conspicuously before handing a small package to the dirty brown tracksuit man and they jog away in opposite directions.

I wait in the queue at the shop behind the tall elderly man in the old fashioned threadbare overcoat, food stained v-neck sweater and beanie hat. He is talking to the Sikh proprietor with the handle bar moustache. “They’ve caught that one in Walthamstow but not the other one. It’s out of control down there, that mayor of London hasn’t got a grip on it. He doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. He’s bloody useless!” An elderly woman in an enormous purple anorak pushes past me. “Sorry”, I say instinctively. “Never mind ‘sorry’, you shouldn’t be in the bloody way!” she says with a scowl.

On the street of dilapidated buy-to-let Victorian terraced houses, the wind has blown open the wheelie bin lids and there is rubbish swirling around the gardens and pavements. In the ginnel next to the house with the smashed fence there are sodden mattresses, a kitchen sink, assorted lengths of polythene, a bent sun lounger, empty dog food tins, bulging black bin liners, and a 1980s taupe and Burgundy velour three piece suite in a busy floral design.

The next street down is a small cul-de-sac of tidy 1990s brick built semi-detached bungalows with fake wooden plastic facias, well tended gardens, milk bottles on doorsteps and Vote Labour posters in the windows. An elderly woman who has secured the doors of her meter housing box with a colourful elasticated spider hook is putting a pair of money trees on the doorstep to wash them off in the rain. She catches sight of me and dashes inside. She returns with an envelope in her hand, “Would you post this for me, love? It’s a birthday card not a Christmas card.”

7am, overcast, light rain: a flock of crows flies over the post office and lands in St Peter’s Gardens

7am, overcast, light rain: a flock of crows sweeps in over the post office and lands in St Peter’s Gardens. They wander around for a bit before flying away again, one pair at a time.

The thin man with filthy hands blags a cig off me outside work. He twitches and mumbles while he rolls it, “If it wasn’t for the postmen, I’d be lost” he says three times. “You guys are really switched on” he says. He pops his cigarette between his lips to light it. He keeps talking but I can’t understand what he’s saying because he has a cigarette in his mouth. He pulls on it, takes it out and tells me “I’ve got system…” and he goes on to explain how he likes to put grapes into cheap wine to improve the flavour. “It’s a good system but it’s nowhere near as good as yours” he says, and he takes a long drag while he gazes at the entrance to the post office as the vans go in and out. “That,” he says, leaving his cig between his lips again as he points at the busy yard, “that is SO switched on. That is SO switched on”.

Later, on the estate, I see a girl of about two or three years old sticking £10 notes to the condensation on the window of her front room. A few doors down, the Toyota Yaris decorated decals of flowers is surrounded on all sides by piles of the most enormous dog turds I think I’ve ever seen. Some are trodden into the asphalt and one in particular has a child’s doll embedded in it.

In the park, the trees glisten bright autumn yellow. The short chubby woman in the pink anorak and chullo hat strolls confidently past the leaf covered stone lion. She stops to pet the black Labrador accompanied by the woman in the gilet and jeans. “Well, you’re the boss, aren’t you darling?” The sun’s brought out lots of gilet dog walkers with their tennis ball launchers and leg warmers.

The bin man is wearing a kilt.

I knock at a door with a parcel. I wait for a while and am about to leave when a woman finally answers, “Sorry, love. I was on the loo.”