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.

Things are slowly drying out in the first real sun of the year.

Things are slowly drying out in the first real sun of the year. Snowdrops and crocuses are appearing on the verges. The big woman in a dirty pink onesie on the bench at the side of the main road inhales from her cigarette with her eyes closed. She adjusts her posture, unfurling like an enormous pink, fleecy rose, stretching out her arms across the back rest. She tilts her head back to absorb the warmth of the sun on her face and exhales a long thin wisp of white smoke vertically up and over Lockwood Taxis.

Across the road, an old man in synthetic fibres rustles past the upturned pushchair. The sun has yet to coax him from his tightly secured drawstring hood, despite its low glare turning his Reactolite lenses black, opaque. His vision must be impaired because he almost bumped into the woman in the grey hooded top, black tracksuit pants and enormous pink fluffy slippers as she came out of the off-licence.

The estate is a spiky forest of broken saplings, TV aerials, and satellite dishes where the last of the  puddles reflect lowered hatchbacks and the dogs bark all day long. Somebody has drawn a half-arsed cock-and-balls motif in biro on the postman’s pouch box.

Half-a-dozen scruffy men on pit bikes systematically doorstep the residents:

“Alright, love? Just wondering if you’ve owt for scrap? Okay love… Sorry darling… Right love…”

A knackered white Transit follows in their wake, pausing outside the house with the bright blue plastic hanging baskets either side of the moulded Ionic columns in filthy, chipped UPVC. One of the pit bike men has discovered an old car tyre on the drive. He opens the Transit’s back doors and chucks it in.

Out on Hangingstone Road, a couple of workmen appear to be dismantling the CCTV gantry that sometimes gets mail addressed to it.* A long crocodile of primary school children march by. One of the teachers is standing with her feet either side of a large pile of dog shit on the pavement and is physically guiding the two-by-two children around it:

“No, Thomas. I am not standing in it, I am standing next to it! 

*On two occasions now I have come across mail addressed to: The CCTV Camera, Hangingstone Road, Huddersfield.

The Snow on the Tops was Striped with Icy 4x4 Tracks.

The snow on the tops was striped with icy 4x4 tracks. It was laid thick and muffled both the early wood-pigeon call and the shouts from the high school football match: hi-vis vests and a hi-vis ball.

The man with the dewdrop on his nose was polishing his Jaguar XJ. He lives in a park-home on the moor. He has one of those old ding-dong door bells (black plastic box with a solid, reliable button that looks like a sun-bleached Trebor Refresher) that are more usually found on the big houses, like those with the heated driveways further down the valley. The man told me his neighbours have fallen out with him.

“They’re jealous since I got the Jag'”, he said, “Them over your left shoulder… Don’t look!” he said, not taking his eyes off mine, “They’ll know we’re talking about them. They complain every time I step out of the house. And them over my left shoulder, they rang the council because I took my dog out without a lead!” 

I glanced down at the floor and kicked a chipping of the decorative spar back behind the concrete rope-edging in an attempt to look nonchalant in front of the neighbours, and he continued, 

“I don’t know why we can’t all just get on, I bet we sound like a load of school kids, don’t we? But we’re all pensioners!”

Later, In the garden of the man who hadn’t put his teeth in yet, I saw a ring-necked parakeet in the cherry tree. 

In the garden opposite, a large and rowdy flock of black-headed gulls was squabbling over something on the lawn. The man without his teeth said they’d frightened him when he’d first come outside, 

“It’s like that Alfred Hitchcock film.” he said, “You know the one I mean?”

“The Birds?” I said

“Aye, that’s the one. Let’s just hope Michael’s not lying dead behind that hedge.”

The Buses Are Racing Each Other Between Stops

The buses are racing each other between stops. The world flies past the window in a blur: BEST CARPET BARGAINS... Klippers Hair Salon... Sambuca Saturday... Karaoke Thursday... MEGA BOXES FOR £8.99... Royal Travel and Money Transfer... iTaste... Extra Care Housing... 2 For 1 on Essentials (illus- trated with a photograph of a packet of digestive biscuits)... YOU CAN’T BUY CHEAPER... Gold International... LE UVST TIPE X... FREE BOTTLE OF POP. A man climbs aboard looking flustered in fake leather and Fair Isle, “It’s always bloody late, this bus! He’s supposed to be five minutes in front of that other one”, he says out loud as he walks down the aisle. “Bloody rubbish!” He sits down next to me in a fug of damp and sweat. The woman in front of us with the grey perm and turquoise gaberdine coat turns around, “These people are much more helpful than the Metro people though”, she says, “And it’s 30p cheaper”, she adds, her knuckles white on the handrail as the bus swings out into the middle lane to overtake its rival. “Go on, lad!” yells the damp sweat man to the driver, pumping his fist.

A pride of door-to-door salesmen (beards, short-back-and-sides, black bomber jackets, black too-long-in-the- leg trousers, black winkle-picker shoes, black zip-up briefcases) are gobbing on the floor and vaping outside the Costcutter. I pass them on my way to the terrace of houses where, during the course of the last twenty-five years, the sheds, the painted lintels, the hebes and hawthorne, the privet and the pyracantha, the decorative limestone and calcite have all been replaced with soiled nappies, empty Skips packets, sundry broken pieces of board (mainly hard and chip) sodden underwear, empty milk cartons, a football boot, a stained mattress, empty paint tins, a broken toothbrush, a dustpan, a bent trampoline on its side, assorted lengths of polythene, a broken monster truck toy, party-popper shells, broken bottles, rusty pieces of micro-scooter, bits of an old gate, dog shit, traffic cones, energy drink cans, a kitchen unit with mould on it, a car with lichen on it, takeaway trays and a partially incinerated (artificial) Christmas tree.

The woman in the faded pink anorak and Nike trainers is talking on the phone as she gets off the bus. “I got her some One Direction perfume... I know! Me neither. I’m going to put it away for her for next Christmas... It was only a tenner... You can’t go wrong, can you? And it’s lovely and fruity—I’d wear it. Those princess ones she has are vile... I don’t know... Horrible... Yeah, just as a stocking filler... perfect... I know! Lovely and fruity, I’d wear it—much nicer than these princess ones... Yeah... only a tenner... I know... One Direction perfume for only a tenner, it’s not to be sniffed at...”

2014 has been a great year for holding a digestive biscuit between your teeth.

2014 Highlights:

Holding a digestive biscuit between your teeth while you watch a flock of geese

Laying some new, yellow concrete flags directly over the old cracked ones

Having a bit of cake on your face

Selling the stone flags from your yard and replacing them with dog shit

Poking a yolky knife at a picture of a semi-naked man

Amplexus on the steps of the house that once featured on TV’s Grand Designs programme

Emptying your catheter bag into the storm drain by the bedroom furniture shop

Adjusting your vest top and putting out your cigarette (as a mark of respect)

Asserting that steam railways make life worth living

Watching two ducks eat some chips

Being a goth, then normal, then a muslim

Spraying an old push-bike yellow in the rain

Mending a Transit Connect

Sleeping in a shopping basket attached to a walking frame

Cycling

Referring to your Mercedes using the pronouns She and Her
Returning to the crew cut and rat tail in your 60s

Asking Robert: Have you any food on?

Calling Robert a robbing bastard

Gobbing out of the window of a Fiat 500

Having your tits grabbed by Kyle

Recommending a cut of pork loin

Selling a pebble for a pound

Being inside a Range Rover

Swallowing a mouse in just three gulps

Being important enough in Fair-Isle and corduroy

Watching the jackdaws while you piss against a tree

Nightclothes in the daytime

Polishing your alloys and smoking weed

Soiled nappies and an enraged goose

Jokes and cigarettes outside the strip club

Wearing your hard hat over your hood

Talking to the lonely pig on the moor

Bemoaning all this rigmarole

The sun is low, boiler flues are pluming, the garden gate is slimy, and the old man with the eye-patch...

The sun is low, boiler flues are pluming, the garden gate is slimy, and the old man with the eye-patch, bandana, boot-cut jeans and biker jacket is bemoaning “All this bloody rigmarole for £1.63 in bloody pension credits” to his neighbour, the tall thin man in the plastic reindeer antlers with the dew-drop hanging from his nose.

All of a sudden hailstones are bouncing off the ‘Santa, Please Stop Here’ sign which is planted in the pot next to the fake plastic topiary bay tree.

A woman with an anorak and a bag-for-life is talking to a group of other women with bags-for-life. “I don’t feel the cold anymore because I’ve got...” she stops to think for a moment, then turns to the woman in the enormous scarf next to her, “What is it I’ve got, Joyce?” “Diabetes,” says Joyce. “No!” says the woman, suddenly remembering, “A onesie.”

The Lonely Pig on the Moor

Every day this week, I’ve seen the lonely pig on the moor. It runs to the perimeter of its pen and stares at me as I walk past. Yesterday morning, when it came to meet me, I made two pig-like grunts (I don’t know why, I wasn’t really thinking about it) and it responded in the same manner.

Further up the moor, Mr Briggs pulls up. He winds down the window of his Suzuki Carry and tells me that he and his missus have been by coach to Eastbourne for a ‘Turkey and Tinsel Weekender’. “Aye,” he explains, “Tuesday was Christmas Eve, Wednesday was Christmas Day, and Thursday was New Year’s Day. £125-a-head all-in, including four drinks, which is enough. We had a real time!” Mr Briggs goes on to tell me that by the Thursday (New Year’s Day) he’d found he fancied a fish. He says he travelled to a chip shop in Brighton only to find that they cost £10.50 so he hadn’t bothered in the end.

Back in town, the gas board are digging up the roads. The woman in the pink onesie who is sitting on her front step surrounded by small statues of Yorkshire terriers while she smokes a cigarette, tells me, “It’s a right pain, there’s nowhere to bloody park.”

A gold Kia Picanto screeches to a halt outside the church and a man in his seventies with a beard and glasses gets out brandishing a small hand plane. He slams shut the car door, shoulders open the gate of the churchyard and sprints down the path and through the open doors. Within seconds I can hear the sound of wood being energetically smoothed echoing out from the church interior.

At 2.30pm, at the top of the hill, I encounter two large women in their seventies. They are dressed in identical spotted Dalmatian onesies and appear to be very drunk. They cling to one another as they zig-zag across the middle of the road whilst inexplicably making load “miaow” noises like enormous bipedal dog-cats. In the supermarket, the woman with the sensible shoes and bag-for-life is telling her husband about her dislike of Milk Tray chocolates. “Don’t ever buy me Milk Tray again! I hate them! Joan bought me some last year and I’ve still got them. Yuk!”

PS: The film at the head of this post was shot from approximately the same place that Edwardian filmmakers Mitchell and Kenyon made their short film in Huddersfield 114 years ago. Link to BFI Player here: http://player.bfi.org.uk/film/watch-employees-of-messrs-lumb-and-co-leaving-the-works-huddersfield-1900-1900/

6.15am: Dancers and Bouncers were Sharing Jokes and Cigarettes outside the Strip Club

6.15am: Dancers and bouncers share jokes and cigarettes outside the strip club. The dancers are wearing their ‘standing outside’ uniform: white faux-mink coats, suspenders and heels. The bouncers wear black suits and patent shoes.

The man behind me on the bus to the hospital has a loud hacking cough. I get off where a group of builders with hard hats over their hoods are smoking in a huddle outside the house with the empty Cheese Curls packet and pile of dog shit underneath the trampoline in the yard.

There’s a lot of rotten pre-recession Ground Force decking around here and it’s slippery and treacherous at this time of year; the old man with butter on his nose advised me to watch myself after I slipped on his.

In the street, a young man with a shaved head and tracksuit is vacuuming his brand new Vauxhall Corsa while he listens to Robbie Williams quite loudly.

Out in the sticks, beyond where the remains of the smashed up traffic cone have been strewn across the road for weeks. Beyond even where the empty breakfast bowl and spoon have been left on top of the dry-stone wall a half mile from the nearest house (It’s been there for several days and there’s an inch-and-a-half of rainwater in the bowl now), a low mist is sitting in the valley bottom. The grey road is accented with orange cherry leaves and a large flock of fieldfares is messily stripping out all the berries from a big rowan tree.

On the driveway at Oakwood, a man of about thirty-five, with a beard and donkey jacket, has his head under the bonnet of his thirty-year-old Saab 900 while he listens to Talking Heads quite loudly.