At the entrance to the park, the shaggy Border collie called Chicken was being restrained by its owner…

At the entrance to the park, a shaggy Border collie called Chicken is being restrained by its owner: “No, Chicken! Leave it! Chicken! No!” 

Around the corner at the house with the new pattern imprinted concrete driveway, I eventually realise that the large polished red and white streaked calcite sphere on the window sill isn’t the back of the head of an elderly man with a ruddy complexion and a wispy white comb-over, and I stop trying to attract its attention. 

Back in town, an enormous man driving a Mini passes me as I walk under the stalactites that hang from the arch of the railway bridge. He clatters noisily over the steel road plates that cover the pothole at the entrance to Tesco’s car park, parks across two spaces and hoists himself out by grabbing the door frame with both hands.

The golf pro’ with the Hoxton fin cranes his neck to watch the small yellow aeroplane from the nearby airfield as it flies low overhead. 
At one of the houses that backs onto the green, a thin bald man in a fleece jacket and faded jeans is carefully stencilling the names Brian and Susan onto the back rest of a wooden bench in a swirly gold font. I pass him as he’s admiring his work. He glances up and waves briefly before walking up the gravel path, past the little tableau on the lawn: a stone tortoise apparently engaged in combat with a tiny plastic second world war infantryman that has been painted white. At the entrance to the conservatory, the man places his unlit roll-up on the window sill, kicks off his boots and disappears inside behind a bookcase of faded hardback autobiography spines: Botham, Clough, Greavsie …

I knocked at a house on the estate of Range Rovers and shop bought topiary

I knocked at a door on the estate of Range Rovers and shop bought topiary, where the fake cobblestones still have their barcodes stuck to them. Inside the house a dog barked enthusiastically while a woman implored it to “Stay in there, you!” Eventually, the door shuddered open to reveal the woman in a Fair Isle onesie, holding the dog by its collar. “He’s just bloody humped the gas man,” she explained, “I’m not letting him near you!”

It’s quiet around here among the lawns, the winter flowering pansies, the lavender, and the leylandii. There are more tradesmens' vans than residents’ cars during the day. Occasionally, a disembodied arm extends from an open window to shake crumbs from a tea towel or an immaculate twelve year old Nissan Primera reverses slowly from a driveway. On the pavement outside the pebble-dashed inter-war bungalow with the rotten timber frames and the dangerous chimneys, a cat is fighting with a marigold glove. Further down, where the three empty cider bottles have been left in a neat row under the hawthorn, an elderly man hobbles by in a threadbare camel-hair coat secured at the waist with packing tape. In the gutter, a light breeze fans the pages of a discarded Max Hastings novel and, at the bottom of the cul-de-sac, an old woman bends to pick up a Virgin Media flyer from her doormat, “Red hot sale!” she says, rolling her eyes, “That’s going straight in the bin! I don’t even believe in Richard Branson!”

It’s been windy today and the bird shit stained section of road below the canopy of the trees…

It’s been windy today and the bird shit stained section of the road below the canopy of the trees at the entrance to the estate is now completely covered with leaves.

A woman with Cosmic Purple hair and a boat-neck Breton shirt walks a black cat on a lead around the perimeter of her garden. She stretches out her left hand for support against the gable wall as she negotiates the narrow gravel path which is lined on both sides with a variety of cat statuettes.

An elderly woman with a nicotine yellow perm and a purple anorak passes me. She’s conducting a loud conversation with a man in a beanie hat and an enormous jumper:

“Well, he’s pissing in the bed,” says the man.

“Well, that’s not good,” says the woman.

“Well, he can’t get out, can he?”

“Well, can’t they give him a bed pan?”

“Well, he can’t feel his legs, can he?”

“Well, he needs a catheter, doesn’t he? Will they not give him a catheter?”

“Well, they won’t. They say he can get out of bed but he just doesn’t want to.”

There are yard brushes leant against unnecessary porches and charity bags containing mainly jigsaws on the driveways. starlings attempt a small murmuration and harassed lapwings stalk worms in the back field. A woman in a rusty coloured fleece jacket shows me the cut on her thumb. “I’ve knackered my hand unblocking the drain,” she says, “That’s what happens when you don’t have a man about.”

I gave Molly a lift home from school…

I gave Molly a lift home from school. ‘This week has gone so quickly’ she said, ‘I can’t believe it’s nearly next weekend already’. We passed the bus stop where a man dressed as a ninja with two sticks of french bread under his arm was struggling to light a cigarette without dropping them.

It was bright and sunny again, quiet and calm days out in the sticks. I could hear power tools and dogs barking half a mile away. A couple in their sixties wearing matching plaid shirts (hers accessorised with a brown leather belt at the waist) were walking perfectly in step through the village. They synchronously tore pieces from their pasties and chewed in unison. When somebody they knew passed them in a car, they noticed simultaneously, both glancing up at the same time before breaking into smiles and holding aloft their right hands to wave.

An old woman was talking to her gardener about the neighbour who had recently returned from a holiday abroad: ‘Have you seen his suntan? He’s so dark! I didn’t want to let him in. I don’t usually let people that colour in the house!’

Autumn spiders have moved in on the flies that have been basking on the white UPVC doors. Silk shrouded baubles of pre-digested carcass dangle from the pretend wooden beading, bobbing silently in the light breeze.

Down from where the giant mechanical dinosaur has been tearing at the walls of the old YMCA building…

Down from where the giant mechanical dinosaur has been tearing at the walls of the old YMCA building, three short men were pulling on green hi-vis jackets and switching on an improvised lightbox sign: Hand Car Wash Now Open. 300 yards further down the road again, a short man in a grey tracksuit was dwarfed by the 7’ high sandwich board that he was dragging out onto the pavement: Hand Car Wash Now Open. 

The weather has turned. In the sticks, people in trademarked waterproof fabrics suffixed with ‘tec’, swarm around the blackberry bushes in the lanes while streams of run-off carry acorns, twigs and beech nut husks around their Brashers. On Woodsome Road I swerved around the well-wrapped, backpacked Nordic-walking couple who had eschewed the generous pavements in favour of the middle of the road.

In town, flies were basking in the last of the residual heat from the white UPVC doors and fascia boards. I disturbed some when I knocked at a house on Moss Street and got a face full. They were swarming around the overflowing green re-cyclers that the new students have mistaken for normal refuse bins too. The bin men have left them on the pavements along the length of Elm Street

The golf club was swarming with regional representatives of the Kitchen and Bathroom industry at their annual networking event. A man with a receding hairline, grey slacks and a fleece jacket stepped out of a van decorated with a wraparound livery featuring a naked young woman enjoying a shower. 

“Have you ever watched that Doc Martin?” the man asked his companion.

“With Martin Clunes?” his companion responded

“Yes, it’s fucking shit hot.”

On my way home, a woman on a mobility scooter began shouting abuse and gesticulating wildly towards me as I approached. I crossed the road towards her and, as I got nearer she shouted “It’s all right love, I’m talking to myself!”

At the bus stop, the man with the grey beard, striped polo-shirt and large silver watch was bent over...

At the bus stop, the man with the grey beard, striped polo-shirt and large silver watch was bent over scratching both his knee and his elbow at the same time. Across the road, another man with a striped shirt and grey beard was painting his gate bright yellow for the second day running. Further up the road, at the next bus stop, a young man in a snapback baseball cap and headphones was dancing enthusiastically by himself. And, around the corner, on Cross Lane, I saw the same man delivering the same flyers to the same houses I saw yesterday.

Six squirrel sightings today: two in trees, one running along the edge of a skip and three dead in the road.

Somebody had lit a bonfire too close to the Costcutter. Even inside the shop, the smoke was acrid. A teenage couple were standing outside. He had a tattoo on his neck and was gobbing on the floor. She was wafting the smoke from her face with her cigarette hand and hoicking her grey marl sweatpants out of her arse crack with the other. A Ford Fiesta went past in too low a gear.

On the estate with the diverse and imaginatively improvised garden furniture, a boy on a BMX stopped me as I was unloading my van:

“Are you Postman Pat?”

“No. Postman Pat’s got a helicopter now. I’ve still got this rusty old van.”

“Postman Pat is ugly anyway” said the boy “He hasn’t got a helicopter. He hasn’t even got a black and white cat. He hasn’t got owt. He’s ugly and he goes on Ebay!”

At the gap in the wall where the stone was stolen, the thin lorry driver with the blue overalls and round glasses was drinking tea from a Thermos mug. “There won’t be any stone left in Huddersfield at this rate!” he said.

Somebody has stolen the top-stones from Mrs Taylor’s garden wall too, and last night somebody unscrewed the hinges of my shed door.

On the way to the bus stop, I almost collided with the fully loaded, seven foot high floral display unit on wheels.

Rushing to catch the bus, I almost collide with the fully loaded, seven foot high floral display unit on wheels. A thin man in a tracksuit is pushing it down the street to the entrance of The Bargain Shop. He parks it up and attaches an A4 handwritten sign to it with sellotape: ‘MEGA CHEAP CHEESE IN FRIDGE’.

I miss my bus. I watch it go past as I’m telling the tall man in the mauve shirt and black, pleat-front straight-cut short-leg perma-crease trousers how to get to the Ann Summers shop.

Half an hour later than planned, I alight outside the Conservative Club where a new, painted sign had just been erected. In navy blue on a sky blue background it says: 

AVAILABLE

GAMES  DARTS  DOMINOES  CARDS

BILLIARDS  SNOOKER  POOL

CROWN GREEN BOWLING

AND DRINKS AT 

REASONABLE PRICES

T.V. SKY SPORTS

ENTERTAINMENT – SEE EVENTS

Chapel Street smells of perming solution again. Struggling up it, the old woman with swollen ankles and two bags of shopping says “I wish someone would turn this bloody hill round”.

I compliment the elderly man on his work, he’s been building a shed all week and it is impressively level, despite the extreme incline of the ground. I shout over to him three or four times but I think he must be hard of hearing because he just smiles and makes comments about the weather and an appointment at the hospital he’s got to remember.

On the estate where elderly women with perms, mid-calf length skirts and sandals walk terriers and knock on one another’s doors holding polythene bags, I’ve been stopping for a chat with the man with the southern accent who sits outside his house on a mobility scooter. Today, he’s not there. His wife is though, on an old bentwood chair on the patio next to the statue of a meerkat with a magpie’s feather glued into its paw. “Your mate’s not here today,” she says “He’s gone down there to get some rolls”. She waves an arm in the direction of the shops. “He calls teacakes ‘rolls’!” she laughs.

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.