At 6am, my neighbour slammed his front door and shouted “Bastard!”

At 6am, my neighbour slammed his front door and shouted “Bastard!” at the top of his voice.

At 6.30am In Northumberland Street, two young women were lying on their backs in the middle of the road, singing.

At 12.20pm in Church Street I saw a man in a heavy beige anorak – it was 23°C. He also wore two mansize tissues under the arms of his spectacles like large white blinkers.

At 2.30pm at the farm, the barbed wire fence was hung with clumps of snagged wool, the horse that was wearing the blanket kicked the one that wasn’t in the face and the two Border Terriers barked hysterically, almost throttling themselves on their chains. A swallow flew low over a dry stone wall, skilfully avoiding a collision with the giant fat ceramic blue tit which is fastened to the top of the gate post with a big blob of cement, while the farmer told me his neighbour is a lazy cunt.

At 3pm, while I was on my way home, I think the woman with the thick dark hair, glasses and the jumper round her waist heard me talking to myself in a Scouse accent.

I pulled up too far from the control unit for the entry barrier...

I pulled up too far from the control unit for the entry barrier at the entrance to the technical college. There was a queue of traffic behind me so I couldn't manoeuvre the van any closer. I opened my door and stretched out my arm as far as I could but my foot got tangled in the mat in the footwell and I fell out and onto the street.

Today's squashed wildlife: a frog, a shrew, a slug, two snails, a bee, a squirrel, two earthworms, a wasp, half a starling and a moth*

The woman with the new BMW and the tight jeans was telling her neighbour, a man in cargo pants and a white T-shirt, "When you only pay two, three, four grand for a car it's gonna be a heap of shit."

"I know," said the man,"There was no heated seat, no cd player nor nowt!"

The woman at one of the barn conversions on the moor has pressed her old aerobics step into use as a stand to display her houseplants on. She has created a two-tiered tableau in the big picture window at the front that looks out onto her neighbour's Mitsubishi Animal. Next door, where the garden backs onto acres of idyllic rolling countryside as far as the eye can see, Mrs Moorhouse was pedalling determinedly on the exercise bike she's rigged up in her garage.

Two window cleaners were talking as they dripped suds from their Bedford Rascal to the houses on the estate. "They were good sarnies this morning, you know", said the smaller, thinner, younger of the two who was carrying a bucket and some ladders.

"I still would rather have had a breakfast," said the taller, fatter, older one who was carrying the van keys.

"I know what you're saying", said the younger one.

I knocked at a house with a parcel. I was about to give up waiting when I heard some fumbling around with keys behind the door. After a couple of failed attempts to unlock it, all fell silent again for another minute or so until the occupier returned with what I assumed to be another set of keys. This time, after another couple of attempts, the door finally swung open to reveal a man in a blue towelling bathrobe and his hair stuck up on one side. "Sorry, I was in bed," he said, squinting at the sun. It was then that I looked down at the parcel and realised it was for the house next door.

*the moth was inside a packet of Coco-Pops.

At the house with the sign on the gate that says ‘My Doberman lives here’

At the house with the sign on the gate that says ‘My Doberman lives here’ above a picture of a Doberman’s head and a human hand holding a torch, I stand on a snail as a helicopter flies overhead. On the window sill with the dead moths, there is a money tree plant, a single white sock, a dusty snooker trophy and a TDK D90 audio cassette still in its packaging. When I knock at the door, a man with tattoo sleeves answers, “It’s awkward when you can’t see your own writing”, he says as he fills in his signature.

I call at a house with a parcel but nobody is home. I notice people at the house next door so I go to ask whether they’ll take the parcel for their neighbour. A young man in a vest and jogging pants answers. He agrees to take the parcel and asks, “Are they trainers?” I say I don’t know. “I might try them on”, he says. He winks at me and then he puts his hand down the front of his trousers, adjusts his cock and shuts the door.

Two men are talking on the bus: “Have you ever murdered anyone, Carl?” “No, I haven’t, Jim.” “No, me neither.”

A snail crawls up my kitchen window on the morning of the diamond jubilee of HRH Queen Elizabeth ll.

I knocked at the door of a house with a parceI, but nobody came.

I knocked at the door but nobody came. While I was waiting, a man in a blue suit walked past in the street, “Carry it out within the usual framework...” he said into his phone. I knocked at the door again but nobody answered so I went to the next house along where I’d seen a woman in the front-room watching the television. I knocked and rang the bell but the woman didn’t come. I knocked again and she still didn’t come. As I made my way back to the first house to leave a note, I glanced up to see whether the woman was still watching the television. She wasn’t, she was standing with her back against the wall in the lee of the chimney breast, head turned away, trying to be invisible.

A man with a Border terrier, shorts and a Superman T-shirt that was too small for him had stopped to talk to a woman in the street. “Honestly," said the woman, "she’s such a weirdo, she just phoned me and said ‘I just had to pick up a dead pigeon. What are you up to?’”

On the pavement next to the junction box with “Kate is gay” written on it...

  

On the pavement next to the junction box with “Kate is gay” written on it, there was a pair of soiled boxer shorts and two smashed Stella bottles.

At the bus station, a group discussion about sandwich filling preferences was underway. The fat woman in her fifties said she could never eat peanut butter and cucumber because she doesn’t like “sweet and sour stuff”.

10a.m.: I found a pair of glasses in the street, thick old lady ones in a leather case. I knocked at a nearby house to see if somebody might recognise them, but there was no reply. I tried the house next door. There was nobody there either. I crossed to the house opposite and walked up the driveway past the caravan with the punctured leather football stuffed over the tow bar. I could see through the window of the front room and behind the display of beer steins on the window sill, there was a man on a settee with the television on. I knocked on the door but the man didn’t move. I rang the bell and knocked again, harder; he still didn’t move. I went to knock on the window but as I got closer I realised he was asleep. I didn’t wake him up, I went next door, where I could see another man sitting in front of a television. I knocked at his door and, once again, the man didn’t move; he was asleep as well. Eventually (another two doors down) somebody answered: a woman with short grey hair and a beige fleece. She took the glasses from me and said she thought they belonged to a neighbour. “I bet she’ll have dropped them on the way to the bus stop. She’ll have grabbed something out of her bag...” said the woman, twisting round and miming grabbing something from an imaginary bag, “...she’ll have yanked at it and pulled her glasses out by mistake. Thanks love, I’ll bob over with them when she gets back”.

At the school, a boy of about nine years old jumped in front of me and shouted, “Hello, random post guy!”

Just down from the yellow grit bin that’s overgrown with nettles and Mrs Lister’s Clematis—where Dick got a nail in his foot—an elderly couple were waiting for me to pull up in my van. He was wearing head-to-toe beige and she was in head-to-toe pale lavender. Both also wore reactolite glasses which were in full anti-glare bloom. 

“Anything exciting for us!” shouted the lavender lady as I got out.
“No. Next door” I said.
“You want to get a coat” said the man “They’re very good those fleeces but they don’t keep out the rain!”

According to the poster on the lamp-post, the cat with the bit of tinsel around its neck is still missing.

I was walking a few paces behind beard on/beard off man...

I was walking a few paces behind beard-on/beard-off man when he dropped a ten pence piece on the floor. He bent down to pick it up, carefully cradling his dubiously sourced early morning takeaway to his chest as he did so. I overtook him, rounded the corner where the market traders were arguing about the location of their pitches and saw my boss jogging across the road to the office twenty yards ahead. As he reached the pavement by the junction box with the “Oi Ain’t Red” sticker on it, he too dropped some money and then scrabbled around on the floor to pick it up. A few seconds later, when I reached the junction box, I noticed a pound coin he must have missed, so I picked it up.

A man in black-track-suit-bottoms-with-white-bits-on told me to fuck off when he realised I’d seen him talking to himself.

A jogger with an ipod and a lightweight windcheater passed me as I approached the house with the massive Audi on the drive and the plastic snowdrops in three miniature galvanised buckets on the doorstep. I was about to knock at the door when the occupier, a woman wearing a black quilted jacket, pulled onto the drive in a new Mini. “How’s that for timing?” She said as she got out of the car. I suggested she must have some kind of sixth sense that tells her when the post is going to arrive and she said “Yep, I’m psychedelic me”.

My neighbour keeps free range rabbits, chickens and guinea fowl.

My neighbour keeps free range rabbits, chickens and guinea fowl. She lives in a terraced house on a busy road with a small, paved yard. She often leaves the gate open so the animals can roam up and down the street. The first time I saw this, I assumed the animals had escaped and I knocked at her door to tell her. She waved me away and said it didn’t matter. This morning a fox was chasing one of her rabbits round and round the house opposite.

I thought I’d left for work about ten minutes late but I saw all the regulars in their usual places: The black VW Golf with the Polish plates, the silver Punto whose driver sits talking on the phone with the engine running next to the wall where all the pointing fell out in one piece after the bad frost, the 302 bus with the men in hi-vis jackets on board, the tall man with his brace of labradoodles who never says hello, the woman whose collies round up the ducks in the park, the former postman and his wife who say they couldn’t wish for a better lifestyle now he’s retired, the brazen blackbird that hops along at my feet for several yards at the entrance to the park, the disheveled starey-eyed beard-on/beard-off man with the jittery gait and his dubiously sourced early morning takeaway. Five Canada geese also flew low over my head in formation on their way to the pond.

At work, I almost hit a lorry driver who was wearing braces as he descended from his cab. I was distracted by the car park attendant who has taken to wearing a stab vest.

At the reception of the University halls of residence, the Mike Posner song You Think You’re Cooler Than Me was on the radio and, at the precise moment I asked Mr Hewitson for his name for the third time this week, I heard the lyric “and you never say hey, or remember my name. It's probably cuz, you think you're cooler than me.” If Mr Hewitson noticed, he never let on.

At the junior school office, I queued behind a woman with a budgerigar in her handbag (it had hurt its wing and she was only calling in on the way to the vets) and a man who was dropping his daughter off whilst wearing a Keep Calm and Eat Pussy T shirt.

On my way home, I stopped at the supermarket where a big fat man in a Spanish football shirt farted loudly by the turnips.

There was nobody around apart from three men in hi-visibility clothing...

There was nobody around apart from three men in hi-visibility clothing (myself being one of them. I was in orange, the others in green). We were each walking down different streets towards their confluence which we reached simultaneously.

Twice today, I saw the man who wears the all-year-round head-to-toe waterproofs and runs everywhere. The first time he was running up Heaton Road with his waterproof hood up, The second, he wasn’t running and he had his hood down; he was giving directions to somebody in a Kia Rio on Outcote Bank.

In a rush, I erroneously entered Mr Stead’s name into my PDA as ‘Steadi’. I handed it over for him to sign and apologised if he thought I was being over familiar. He said he didn’t mind at all because he’d been known as ‘Steadi’ throughout his school days which he remembered with particular fondness.

A man in his thirties was standing in the road talking to an elderly woman. She was wearing beige salwaar kameez, headscarf, thick plastic rimmed glasses and a pair of black canvas pumps decorated with a white skull and crossbones motif. The man had a dog, a huge akita, which was also in the road. Also in the road was another man who, with his buck teeth and moustache had a look of Freddie Mercury about him. He was encouraging four children of between about six and nine years to pelt the dog with sticks and small stones from a distance of about two metres. The dog’s owner and the woman were both aware of what was happening but did nothing to discourage the children as missiles began to pile up around their feet. The dog was placid, only ducking between its owner and the old woman for shelter when the barrage became particularly intense. The children continued to throw stuff while Freddie Mercury sourced ammunition for them. Eventually I got into my van and pulled out from the kerb. None of the children, the two men, the woman or the dog attempted to get out of my way and I sat waiting for about thirty seconds. Eventually the man pulled his dog onto the kerb and out of range of the children who then retreated to the other side so I could pass, crushing piles of sticks and pebbles under the wheels as I went.

On my way into work I passed a man I often see around...

On my way into work I passed a man I often see around. He never speaks to me but he once held open the door at the Co-op and he’ll sometimes nod stiffly in my direction. On this occasion though, he ignored me completely. 

In the park I saw the chubby man with the comb-over, he was with his black labrador, John. 

I paused on Fitzwilliam Street to swap a woollen hat for a peaked cap and a man with pointy shoes, short tippy-tappy strides and a Liverpool FC plastic carrier bag overtook me just as a Suzuki Swift killed a pigeon at the traffic lights.

On the estate of barely detached houses with the mainly new, mainly black, mainly German cars. I went to number three where the mini with ‘Maureen’ written on it was parked in the driveway. I waited on the front step next to a scale model of a baby rabbit and the doormat which has NICE TO SEE YOU, TO SEE YOU NICE written on it. Next door, a man in a suit and dark glasses paused while he unlocked the door of his BMW. He glanced over to me across his plastic lawn and said “Anything for numero uno before I head off?” I said there wasn’t. Eventually the door of number three opened and a thin man in his sixties with a dressing gown undone to the waist smiled and said “Good morning sir!” I smiled back and handed him his package “Yes. Thank you! Thanks a lot. Ta. Thank you. Thank you” he said.

Also today, I heard some men playing the bagpipes on the ring-road and an owl.

Mr Simpson gave me a lift to work in his new car...

Mr Simpson gave me a lift to work in his new car with the de-mister that comes on when he literally tells it too. I told Julie about it at work and she said Mr Simpson has five sugars in his tea. 

This week’s wildlife of note:

A woodpecker, a jay, some lapwings, a lark, rabbits, deer, a dead fox, some chickens, up to two dozen black labradors, numerous koi carp and two plastic heron (one stood up and one lying down on its side)

The chickens at the farm were pecking at the dog's bone while the builders listened to People Are People by Depeche Mode on their heavy duty radio.

I couldn’t get up Hill Top because of the two rival dog walker’s vans that had parked to collect their charges from houses on opposite sides of the street.

Mr Briggs pulled up to tell me he’d just heard on the news that the cheapest petrol station in town is the Jet garage at Lockwood.

The woman in the trench coat asked “Is it going to make a nice day, do you think?”

“I’m not sure but it’s looking good at the minute” I replied.

“I know, but will it last?” said the woman.

No Surprises by Radiohead has been going round my head all week. Today I think I worked out why; several of the door bell chimes on my delivery sound like the song’s opening two notes.