The Bin Lorry is Stopping Every Ten Yards

The bin lorry is stopping every ten yards. Its loading mechanism makes a noise like that long note at the beginning of Rhapsody in Blue. It dawdles its way down the long road which starts with pebble-dashed maisonettes and the smell of weed at one end, and finishes with detached inter-war bungalows and the smell of seaweed fertiliser at the other. Somewhere around the middle, a man is sitting in his front room ignoring the TV while he reads Russell Grant’s astrology page. Next-door, his neighbour, who is naked apart from a pair of glasses, is playing with his Playstation.

Out in the sticks, a goldfinch flies out from under my feet and the fake grass at the barn conversion is still too green to be mistaken for the real thing. I pass an open window; a woman is having an angry telephone conversation: “Well, it says here that the short length is four-and-a-half centimetres! Well I’ve no idea what four-and-a-half centimetres is in inches!”

There’s cherry blossom, tulips, a rusty cement mixer, leylandii, pyracantha, ruthlessly pruned buddleia, and wooden telegraph poles. A woman in one of those cream, full-length puffer coats that makes the wearer look like an enormous maggot is walking a big black greyhound.

The pub is taking bookings for New Years Eve (‘food will be served between 7-10pm’). Tonight they are serving tapas between 6-9pm and there’s a wet pair of suede loafers in the hyacinth bed.

Stone Buddhas, Buckets of Cig Butts, Missing Top Stones.

Stone Buddhas. Buckets of cig' butts. Missing top stones. 

The woman with the Brexit tote bag walks past the shop advertising ‘Kids £4.’

Litter traps behind broken gates: energy drink cans and takeaway-styrene.

Down from where the big stuffed Tweetie Pie has been lynched from a fall pipe, the young man holding a toddler is talking to the middle-aged woman in the bathrobe. She is sipping from a pint glass.

A bag-for-life in the gutter, cat shit in the ginnel, a torn office chair and a sodden carpet in the miry garden.

Outside the house with the weed smoke wisping from the open window, a woman screams “PACK IT IN!” to the children in the back of the new Freelander.

“Fuck off! What the fuck?” shouts the man when I post his mail. The door opens and he runs across the piss soaked carpet in the yard and up the ginnel shouting after me, “What are you fucking doing! If the dog catches you in the garden, she’ll bite you, innit!” He stops next to a slimy piece of roughly sawn timber and says in a more composed voice, “You need to rest it behind this bit of wood in the alleyway, innit. If the dog catches you, it’s gonna bite you, innit.”

Down from the witch’s house with the hedge full of empty plastic bottles, I follow three men from the engineering shop on their way to the bakery. In identical overalls and of a similar build, the only thing that distinguishes them from one another is their differing stages of male pattern baldness.

The old man in the hi-vis vest is walking with both his arms outstretched, a bag-for-life full of groceries in each hand.

Two sporty young men are walking down Wood Lane, one is wearing a Nike sports bag on his back, the other, grey-marl sweatpants which he is repeatedly hoiking from his arse crack. I follow in the wake of their loud, expletive-ridden conversation and their pungent weed smoke before they turn off into the student halls of residence.

The lights are out in the shop and there’s hardly any stock left, but it’s still open.

The recent spell of fine weather has brought other people onto the streets

The recent spell of fine weather has brought other people onto the streets over which the elderly women in purple anoraks have held sole dominion in recent months.

A dozen motorcycles pass a middle-aged cyclist as he rides through the village in lycra. He rolls his eyes and shouts to me above the noise, “Hell’s angels are out!”

A middle-aged man in Crocs is chamoising the Skoda Yeti on the driveway of the semi-detached new-build. The sun glints off of the plastic chrome while he whistles along to Bad Moon Rising on the car’s stereo.

The man sitting in the driver’s seat of the parked up Vauxhall Astra with the custom paint job, body kit, blacked-out windows, and ‘Bang Tidy’ sticker in the back, is eating a pot of Muller Rice.

Earlier, on the estate, I tried to deliver a parcel but was intercepted by a short middle-aged man with a grey side parting and a three-quarter length beige anorak. 

“You can leave it with me if she’s not in. She’s rarely at home, she’s a very active woman for a blind lady.”

I thanked the man and handed over the parcel.

“Could you pop me a note through, just to let her know I’ve got it?” said the man.

“I can,” I said, “but how will she read it if she’s blind?”

The man smiled wisely, “Sense of touch,” he said. Then he tapped his eye with his forefinger and explained, “When these pack up, the others pick up.”

“Oh” I said.

A small Asian girl with a snotty nose asks me where I’m going next.

“Over that way,” I say, waving my arm up the street.

“Pakistan?” asks the girl.

On the track down to the house where the men from Kudos Doors (Commercial and Domestic Door Systems) are working, I see a green woodpecker.

A couple of events:

A Bird Spotter's Guide to Yorkshire

DECAPOD - AirSpace Gallery 10th Birthday
I am showing two short films, A Bird Spotter's Guide to Yorkshire and A Seasonal Guide to Yorkshire at the excellent Airspace Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent between March 4th to April 2nd, 2016.
More information: www.airspacegallery.org

Huddersfield Literature Festival 2016 
I am reading from The Most Difficult Thing Ever at Café Society in Huddersfield on March 9th.
More information: www.litfest.org.uk

The sun is out.

The sun is out. Jackdaws peck at something in the road and an ambulance drifts by slowly as I follow the old woman with the done-up-to-the-top parka, pink floral leggings and four pack of Special Brew out of the newsagent’s. She almost loses her balance and has to steady herself on the bin for a few seconds.

Weed

Air freshener

As they walk into the early sun, both the man in the lumberjack shirt and his golden retriever, are haloed by its glare. The dog stops to piss on a holly bush and the resulting cloud of vapour rises to combine with the mist of their breath, swirling around them until they almost disappear from view.

Dogshit

I disturb a small swarm of the first-flies-of-the-year, in the ivy by the house of the man who is wearing a football kit and no shoes.

Chemist shop interior

There is orange lichen on the ridge tiles and vivid green moss on the pavements. I side-step a young girl in wheelie-shoes and a grown-up’s sweat shirt, empty arms flapping.

Cigarette smoke

There’s a man chopping timber in the woods with an axe: bobble hat, a pair of those reddy-brown rubberised gloves with the unbleached ribbing. And now the students are going past on the double-decker from the halls of residence that used to be the mental hospital where I was terrified by the patients while delivering harvest festival produce on behalf of my primary school. I remember a marrow, some tins of sweetcorn and a skinny old woman with dribble down her chin who shouted and swore and pulled at my sleeve. 

Newsprint

Washing powder

The geese make that noise they make. I can still hear them all the way down at the house with the windowsill of silk flowers in Costa coffee mugs.

Weed

There’s a woodpecker on the avenue of Victorian mansions. Plastic fascia boards creak in the sun. Crocuses. People can’t agree whether it’s warm or cold. The woman in the camel hair coat who's waiting for a taxi with three children says, “Ooh, in’t it warm” but just round the corner, the window cleaner with the woolly hat and the scarf wrapped around his face says, “By ‘eck, it’s cold”.

Bins

Wholemeal bread

There’s a woman speaking Urdu very loudly on speaker-phone at the bus stop. The other half-dozen people in the queue are finding it amusing, catching one another’s eyes and laughing behind their hands.

Boiler flue vapour

I pass the house with the tiny cluttered garden: children's ride-on toys in faded plastic, dogshit and a fallen over gravestone:  Mum Gran Sadly Missed

Perming solution

The roofer with the skinny jeans and Harrington jacket says he’s never had a cash card in his life, mate.

Washing powder

The house that was built on the field where I used to race my BMX has a poster in the window: SAY NO to greenfield development. SAVE OUR GREENBELT.

There's A Gale Blowing

There’s a gale blowing and the tattered and bleached remains of a flag of St George flaps furiously from the miniature manor house dovecote with the model Morris Traveller parked out front. The woman with the bin liner wrapped around the aerial of her Citroen C3 looks nervously at the straining beech trees that surround the playground, “There’s that many tree-huggers in this village, we’re not allowed to chop them down!” she shouts as a kestrel flies backwards over the school.

A squall rips at the surface of the flooded potholes sending miniature tsunamis flashing the full length of the street and flipping open the bonnet of the big black BMW as it rounds the corner by the church. The driver continues on his way for several seconds before stopping in the middle of the road to clamber out in his suit and pointy shoes to slam it shut again.

Eventually, the storm passes, leaving a clear blue sky dotted with glinting aircraft. The high-end plumbers’ vans and the Mitsubishi pickups cast long shadows across the road; passenger seats and dashboards littered with red-top news, McDonalds bags, biros and notebooks.

On the estate, the man with the bad teeth and brown leather jacket tells me he’s on the sick and bored out of his fucking mind. He says he can’t really complain though because his neighbour is deaf and only has one leg.

I see a nuthatch on the bird table at the famous modernist house, a pair of yellowhammers in the long grass at the side of the farm track, and a brace of pheasants hanging from the door handle of Mr Gaunt’s in the village.

Stepping Around the Shit-Streaked Toilet Paper

Stepping around the shit-streaked toilet paper that trails from drain at the bottom of the hill, I make my way up the flotsam strewn pavement into the village: Cooper’s of Stortford, Capri Sun, an empty pack of three Oral-B toothbrushes, a snapped off cricket bat, some Walker’s salt & vinegar, a KFC box, a Cadbury’s selection box, floating polystyrene, festive wrapping, an overflowing wheelie bin, half a dozen leaky black bin-liners, a bent roller-skate, and a big Porsche 4x4. The woman in the twin-set says she’d report the rubbish but she 'can’t do whatsit-ing’ and she mimes typing on a keyboard.

There are pine needles on the doorsteps.

The old man with HATE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles is complaining because his new glasses are crap and he can’t see to sign his name.

The ladders slide from the roof of the Land Rover Discovery and clatter onto the road. The driver begins lashing them back into place in the heavy rain.

Mr Briggs pulls up next to the still half-flowering blue hydrangea. He winds down the window of his Bedford Rascal and points to the house opposite. He shouts above the noise of the rain and his idling engine. “They’re funny buggers them, you never see ‘em!” He drives away again after conceding that “He’s ok, but she’s a funny bugger, I’ve never seen her!”

The Jackdaws are cawing, and the proprietor of the shop that sells mainly marrowfat peas, salmon paste, toilet paper, and dusty bottles of Paul Masson is sitting in the dark. I open the door and he gets up from behind the counter to put the lights on.

Back outside, the woman in the big coat at the bus stop thumbs her phone. “David Bowie’s dead” she says.

2015 Highlights

2015 Highlights

Karaoke Thursdays
Sambuca Saturdays

Vaping outside the Costcutter
Finding One Direction perfume for under a tenner: not to be sniffed at
Kicking decorative spars back behind the concrete rope-edging with the toe end of your boot
Hoping Michael’s not lying dead behind the hedge
Exhaling a long thin wisp of white smoke vertically up and over Lockwood Taxis
Drawing a half-arsed cock-and-balls on the postman’s pouch box
Approximately Doric architraves
Plastic lawns
Remembering Stumpy
1980s heavy metal on heavy duty radios
Leaving a trail of weed smoke from a Toyota Yaris
Leaving a trail of aftershave from a Porsche 4x4
Polythene: flapping and cracking in broken trees
Often wearing a bathrobe to shout at a dog
Carrying Margaret on your shoulders
Gin and slim and Probably the Best Fish Supper in Town
Holding your new toilet seat under your arm while you argue about parking spaces with a man with ketchup on his face
Not giving a shit about anything other than your fags and your phone
Hoovering your driveway
Comparing your experiences of electrocardiography
Watering down your Fruit Shoot
Lifting out dandelions
Soft toy trophy lynchings
Asserting that steam railways make life worth living
Waving an enormous arm in the vague direction of half of Huddersfield
The underlying murmur of people in tight shorts commenting on the warm weather
Shuffling past a pile of dried dog shit in your open-toed sandals
Strapping an office chair and a postcard display rack to the roof of your KIA Rio
Listening to Lessons in Love by Level 42 through discreetly mounted speakers at quite a high volume
Soberly dressed men drinking extra strength lager
Mainly discussing caravans, caravan based holidays, and the football transfer window
The smaller, less cocksure, banana and ketchup stained promotional air-dancers they used to have outside the Fiat garage when it was a Peugeot one
Smeared dog shit and the sandwich packaging
Spreading solvent with a yard brush
Retiring to make chainsaw carvings of owls to sell at country art fairs
Begging to differ with the woman with the bag for life
Seasonal Ugg boot Cleaning Services
Explaining that you could NEVER eat Weetabix without sugar
Larger-than-life-sized white-stick-defying pedestal-mounted Clear Channel hoardings
Being overtaken by an empty packet of Lambert & Butler and an energy drink can
Wearing your anorak indoors
Wearing your bathrobe to the shop that sells dusty bottles of Mateus Rosé, Lion Bars, Bisto Gravy Granules, and Andrex Toilet Tissue
Not really doing wine
Checking nobody needs a wee

It's bin day and the low sun casts long stripes of wheelie-bin shadow across the road

Bin day. The low sun casts long stripes of wheelie bin shadow across the road as I drive into the village. I park up and walk across the luxurious carpet of vivid green moss to Village Food & Wine: pet bedding and dried dog food systems on display underneath a tatty awning. Inside the shop, the counter is littered with the presentation gift boxes first inspected and then dismissed by the thin, middle-aged woman in the three-quarter length anorak with the muddy hem. “No, they’ve all got chocolate in, she’ll not eat chocolate”, she says. The proprietress, a thin middle-aged woman in a torn body warmer and jeans bends down behind the counter again, vocalising a strange involuntary exhalation as she stretches to the very back of the bottom shelf of the cabinet. “How about this?” she says, righting herself and then setting down a plastic gift box containing a small wine glass and an even smaller bottle of pinot grigio. “What is it?” says the customer, cleaning a stripe through the greasy dust that coats it with her thumb and wiping the residue on her bulging pocket. “It’s wine” explains the proprietress. “Is it dry?” “Yes, I think so.” “I don’t really do wine, what’s it like?” “Apparently it’s very nice, it’s what everyone has now.” “I’m not sure, I don’t really do wine.” “No, me neither, it makes me drunk.”

The sky clouds over and the rain starts. A squall flips up the horse shit in the road, flapping it about briefly before unsticking it from the asphalt and blowing it loose down towards the old vicarage where even the stone cat that I always mistake for a swan (the tail being the neck and head) has blown over.

Back in town at the corner shop, the proprietor is sitting on a stool behind the counter watching the small TV set balanced on top of a display of crisps. “Drug dealing” he mutters under his breath, then he looks up at me and says out loud, “Drug dealing. Is that all they’ve got to do in London?”

On my way home, I call at the supermarket for some milk and a packet of Mini Cheddars. Without looking up, the till woman scans my stuff and says “£1.60”. As I sort through my change she stands up, leans forward and shouts down the line of checkout staff, “DOES ANYBODY NEED A WEE?” I put a £2 coin in her hand. Her colleagues all look up and shake their heads. “RIGHT!” she says, “I’M GONNA BAIL OUT AFTER THIS ONE” and she nods briefly in my direction. “Thank you”, I say, but she’s gone.

Half-a-Dozen Crows, Definitely Crows, Pick at the Very Last Remains of a Dead Squirrel

Half a dozen crows, definitely crows, pick at the very last remains of a dead squirrel in a squall that knocks me sideways on the bridge over the ring road. 

Outside the closed down brothel, a young woman wearing only a long T-shirt and heels is in hushed discussion with a tall man in a big parka. 200 yards further along, the man with the tattooed neck stops suddenly, throws up on the pavement, wipes his mouth and continues on his way. I catch his eye as I pass him. It’s 3.30pm.

Earlier, the weather was calmer, a big feather duvet cloud was slumped over the valley head but the sky directly above was blue and still. In the leaf litter at the bottom of Mrs Brook’s drive a sparrowhawk was opening up a steaming kill and, in the field behind the road sign with the buddleja growing from it, a kestrel was hovering above the half blown away barn.

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