Another bright sunny morning. I followed the chubby bald fifty-year-old paper ‘boy’

Another bright sunny morning. I followed the chubby bald fifty-year-old paper ‘boy’ into the newsagent’s where the man with the intense stare tried to sell me some honey roasted peanuts. “You wanna try them”, he said without blinking, “they’re proper nice, they are”. I refused and, as I stepped outside it began to rain heavily – as if from nowhere. The sky clouded over and the temperature dropped. I thought about going back and buying the nuts but the rain stopped just as suddenly as it had started. it stayed cold though; It was a full half hour before the reactolite lenses of the people in fleece jackets went dark again.

Outside the Church Hall where I was once accused of smoking “wacky baccy”*at a wedding reception, the snow that lined the kerb has given way to dried horse shit, tree litter and slug trails. Large men walk small dogs and large women talk at the bus stop; “I was supposed to be going to Diane’s but I can’t walk nowhere – I’m in agony”. One man’s heels were overhanging the back of his Crocs by about an inch and a half. Another man, who was having his lunch at 11.30am, remarked “Fucking Hell, them Chinese give ‘emselves some right names, don’t they”

I walked up the ring road behind two young men in washed out tracksuits. The taller one – with his hood up – was walking a Staffordshire bull terrier on a lead. His swagger was so pronounced that he eventually built up too much sideways momentum and stumbled, nearly tripping over. To cover his embarrassment, he began a vigorous air punching workout which resulted in his dog being yanked violently sideways with every right jab. The other man wasn’t paying attention to his companion, he had half his arm down the back of his tracksuit pants and was scratching his arse while he wolf whistled at the girl in dark glasses walking down the other side of the road.

*I was only smoking a roll-up.

"Why would anyone want to punch a police horse?" asked the man on thebus...

"Why would anyone want to punch a police horse?" asked the man on the bus, glancing up from his paper. I said I didn't know.

In Primitive Street, a gust of wind blew an empty lager can from one kerb to the other while two drunks were discussing the whereabouts of Jade; "Where is she?" asked the one in the faded blue anorak with the saggy pockets. "I don't know" said the other, "she spat in my face about two years ago".

A woman in her fifties wearing a T-shirt with a skull motif on it nearly fell as she got out of the back of a VW Golf before it had stopped. "Oh, yeah! Just reverse over me why don't you!" she yelled at the driver before running across the road and slipping over on her greasy Yorkstone path. "Grrr! I'm having a really bad day!" she shouted as she got back on her feet rubbing her hip. She opened her front door and a very excited terrier shot out and ran off down the street before she could stop it. "Now the dog's got out!"

Out on the new estate: Fake-sandstone-beige and upvc-white with accents of grit-bin/Cold-Caller-Control-Zone-sticker yellow. The background noise of burglar alarms, wind-chimes, squabbling blackbirds, shouting PE teachers and that weird clanging from the insides of swaying metal street lamps is occasionally drowned out by the engine of the JCB whose driver is concentrating so hard that his tongue is poking out. The fake ornamental bay trees have blown over onto the plastic lawn where the high-pitched cat deterrent is constantly being triggered by the swirling leaves and head banging daffodils. There are sea urchins and highly glazed period folk on the windowsills and solar panels on the roofs. And there are dogs; people without shoes open doors whilst holding dogs by the collar. There are unencumbered and very determined grey haired men in navy blue fleeces who pound the streets. Teeth gritted, they march up hills, arms outstretched for extra balance along the uneven nascent desire lines – past the stalled mums with their hoods up against the drizzle, pushchairs and retrievers in one hand, they reach out for their straggling toddlers with the other. 

I've seen waxwings and swallows within a week of each other.

In the street that smells of meat, the man who looks like my old headmaster was inspecting a discarded cigarette packet...

In the street that smells of meat, the man who looks like my old headmaster was inspecting a discarded cigarette packet. A younger man, who was smoking weed and wearing headphones, did hundreds of keepie-uppies in the road.

On Easter Sunday some of the tenants of the flats had been kept awake until 1.30am by loud music – according to the handwritten note pinned to the front door.

I saw Jonny, he was petting the beautiful Burmese cat in Market Street. He said he thought it was so fine looking it could probably win Crufts – even though it isn’t a dog.

The gardens on the evens side of Daisy Road are still under a foot of snow – only the top of the wheelie-bin with the sticker of the tropical beach scene on it at No.36 is visible because of the drifting. Outside No.12, an uncomfortable looking grey haired woman in an overcoat and reactolite glasses was waiting at the bus stop with three drunks who were arguing over a bottle of White Lightning. At the house with the threadbare union-jack doormat, I was about to post some mail through the door when it was opened by an elderly woman with a tomato stain on her beige duffle coat. She asked whether I’d seen the bin men; “I’m seventy-six years old, they shouldn’t do this to me, it’s upsetting. I put it out and they’ve missed me again!” I told the woman I hadn’t seen the bin men, just the Wheelie Wash man who comes along in their wake. I handed her her mail – some promotional material from Boots about health and beauty products that can ‘supercharge your wellbeing’. “I’ll not be needing that!” she said “It’s going straight in the bin – if it’ll fit!”

On the main Road, just down from the house called The Britvic at No.55, an elderly man with a pull-along shopping cart and thick plastic rimmed glasses stopped me as I passed. “He’s mad isn’t he,” he said. “Who?” I asked. “That silly man from the government who says we can live on £53 a week. I think he must be bloody mental! And that footballer – they’ve all gone bloody mental!”

When I got back to the office my workmates were reminiscing about a retired colleague who once reversed his van into his own car, touched up the damage with Dulux, and then drove to Blackpool to “dry it off”. They asked me whether I remembered him. I said I did but our shifts hadn’t overlapped; I used to cycle home in my trainers so I’d leave my work boots at the office overnight where, unknown to me, for several years, he wore them for the duration of his night shift, replacing them before I arrived for work again the next morning.

6am and light. The sky is cloudless apart from...

6am and light. The sky is cloudless apart from the gas flue vapour that leaks vertically from the houses on Church Street and the zig-zag trail left by a confused pilot above them.
I bump into Patrick again. He's wearing his unusual yellow overcoat and a knackered black baseball cap. He tells me he's been to the 24 hour chemist to get some medication. He says he has the flu and feels terrible – sweaty and cold. He says he's been coughing all night and that he threw-up at around 3am. I say the usual things; "there's a lot of it about... get yourself home to bed... sweat it out... you'll be right in a few days", and then he says goodbye and holds out his hand, I think about it for a second and then I shake it. When I get to work, I go straight to the toilet and wash my hands.

Later, as dry gravel crunches under my feet and the starlings gather in the trees above me, I swallow my first fly of the season as two considerable ladies with broaches and belts and heavy foundation pass me in a fug of something heavy by Yves Saint Laurent; "I know if I get out of the hairdressers for quarter-past I'll be all right."

Later again, at the theatre, the man with his shirt tucked safely into his chinos, interrupts my reading, "Anyone who is thinking of leaving, could you leave now" he says. Two women at the back wearing beige macs leave and the chino man walks off.

The Most Difficult Thing Ever at Huddersfield Literature Festival 2013.

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The Most Difficult Thing Ever at Huddersfield Literature Festival 2013.

On Thursday 14th March 2013 at Café Ollo, Huddersfield, UK at 7pm 
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And again on Friday 15th March 2013 at the Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield, UK from 6pm Details here: https://www.facebook.com/events/474398215947569/

The blackbird was on the gates at the entrance to the park for the second day running

The blackbird was on the gates at the entrance to the park for the second day running. It doesn’t fly away when I pass. It watches me. I walked within a couple of feet of it today and it didn’t flinch.

The sun is out, the sky is blue, there is birdsong; sparrows, starlings, a woodpigeon. Somebody is playing a trumpet. A car pull’s away from the kerb and its tyres crackle and pop on dry tarmac. A man of about fifty, wearing double denim, a waistcoat and a black and white bandana tied around his head, is using the phone box that I’ve never really noticed before. 

There is horse shit in the road.

There are boxy 1970s brick built semi’s with white fascia boards that crack loudly in the sun. There are big picture windows that look down on you like cartoon robot eyes. There are Astras, Minis, Astras, Beetles, Astras, Minis and Astras on uneven concrete and aubretia driveways. There are monolithic decapitated leylandii as big as houses. There are birches and willows, catkins and moss. There are two pieces of litter: An empty Muller Rice pot and a novelty shaped dayglow-yellow pencil eraser. There's a Union Jack and a Get Britain Out of the EU poster. There are silk flowers on the window sills. There are plastic lawns, footballs, grit bins. There are moneysavingexpert.com A4 print-outs blu-tacked to porch windows saying No Cold Callers. There are whistling Eddie Stobart collectors in T-shirts smoking Marlboro cigarettes on hard-standings. They build kit-cars and boats and take things to pieces. There’s the smell of machine oil. There’s the smell of cooking oil. There are chips. There are solid homemade repairs, gates and fences, washers and hinges, ironmongery, fixings and grease. There are guinea pigs in hutches and terriers on the backs of settees. Girls play at hopscotch and boys dress as superheroes while they mend punctures with holes in their knees. 

A man insists I watch as he opens a parcel. Inside it, there is a small statuette of a blackbird perched on a twig.

On the street that smells of strong weed...

On the street that smells of strong weed, a man borrowed my lighter to set fire to an old piece of coir matting. A few doors down, on the step of the end terrace, the white plastic cup of water with the dead fly floating in it and red lipstick on its rim was still there, but today, there was a saturated tampon next to it as well.

A dozen or so coots were on the beck that runs through the field off Bridge Lane, near the ring of mole hills that surround the discarded CD. 

I walked through the university buildings behind a young woman with long dip-dyed hair and wet-look leggings. A lowered Honda Civic skidded to a halt next to her and began revving its engine wildly. The passenger, a young man with a goatee beard and a beanie hat, wound down his window and held out a lit joint towards her. He didn’t speak and his attempt to maintain a nonchalant disposition throughout the encounter was almost successful, only betrayed at the last by the merest eye-flicker of embarrassment when the girl completely ignored him. She barely even glanced up as she turned and walked away down a side street. The man wound up his window again and, wheels spinning in the gutter, he sped away.

The tall thin man I’ve often seen raiding the bins for food was in WH Smith’s. A dew drop fell from his nose and landed in the pages of the boxing magazine he was reading. He closed it and put it back on the shelf.

6am: I walked through the park in a blizzard with a man with bow-legged wellingtons...

6am: I walked through the park in a blizzard with a man with bow-legged wellingtons, a bare head and an unusual yellow overcoat. His name was Patrick and he was "off to Tesco's". I commented on the snow and Patrick said he'd be glad when it's gone, "I bloody fell at the bins the other day, didn't I. I was taking the rubbish out one minute and the next I was flat on my back in the bloody snow. They say there's more in the offing and all – I'm bloody sick of it". Patrick said he didn't envy me my job in this weather. "I bet they pay you fuck all and all" he said. "I spent twenty years working at the hospital between 1975 and 1979[sic] but now I don't bother because it's not worth it". 

The cats in Park Drive made noises like stricken toddlers.

I saw lots of pheasants today. Most were padding aimlessly around the verges of the farm tracks, but one was prone across Mr Etchell's knee, on an old bentwood chair in the corner of a garage, being plucked. 
The woman in the red Ford Fiesta had a large antique mantel clock on her knee. She wound down her window to ask whether I had a parcel for her. When I told her I hadn't, she said that according to the website the parcel had been delivered last Friday – despite the fact she'd only ordered it yesterday. "Maybe there's a hole in the Space-Time Continuum?" I suggested. "No, I think they must have given me the wrong tracking number" said the woman.

The farmyard was littered with dead teasels and broken safety barriers and the filthy dreadlocked collie strained at the chain that tethered it to its dirty white plastic igloo kennel. 
In the lane, a metallic blue 4x4 BMW nearly hit me outside the house where the elderly Over 60s Club volunteer sisters live, with the Support the Lifeboats and Help for Heroes stickers in the window; "She reckons we should go down and open up but they'll not venture out in this, not them that's in their eighties!"

On the bus, the man in his sixties asked the man in his twenties whether he was "Off down The Royal Oak to watch the United game".
"I thought they'd turned The Oak into a mosque".
"No, they knocked that idea on the head in the end".
"Well, it was never a right popular when they mooted it".

As he left the house where the pointing has been patched with expanding foam...

As he left the house where the pointing has been patched with expanding foam, the man in the black-track-suit-top-with-white-bits-on stumbled over the soiled nappies on the doorstep. He kicked at them in frustration and then stuck two fingers up at the twelve month old baby girl who was dribbling over the shoulder of the young woman with the home-dyed pony tail as she made her way down the steps in front of him.

Out on the main road two other young women with home-dyed pony tails had braved the sub-zero weather conditions to have a fist fight in the middle of the street. They both successfully landed several punches to the head while screaming abuse and tearing at one another's vest tops. Two men in bare feet and flip-flops gingerly picked their way around them – and the ice – on their way to the bus stop.

In the rec' behind the house with seven cars on the drive and nobody ever at home, a man in a black-tracksuit-top-with-white-bits-on had pulled down the tyre from the swing and was throwing it at his Staffordshire Bull Terrier.

I saw the flock of waxwings in the church gardens again – the forth day running.

The Most Difficult Thing Ever 2012 (the movie)