Friday 6 June 2014

I was talking to Mrs Kaur in the shop...



“You know her from number 14?” says Mrs Kaur in the shop, “Well, every time she comes in here she’s different, one day she’s a goth, one day she’s like, normal, like, white, normal, and then yesterday she came in and she was a bloody Muslim!”

On Union Street, Mr Coldwell is in his yard trying to spray an old push-bike yellow in the rain. He says it’s for the window display of the florist’s shop on the route of the Tour de France. He’s well into his second can of paint but the rain is washing it off as fast as he can spray it on. “I should have waited for a finer day, it looks crap”, he explains. At the house next door, they have finished laying their new plastic lawn and have now embellished it: in one corner stands a plastic statuette of mole wearing a miner’s helmet and in another, a shiny fake plastic dog turd.

On the new estate, a magpie is squawking hysterically and dive-bombing the fat black cat which eventually hides underneath a Suzuki Vitara for cover.

A bit further down, the young mum is struggling to load baby equipment around the large custom built speaker system in the boot of the new VW Polo. A bit further down again, next
to the children’s playground that the children never play on, a man with a good two-thirds of his arse showing is mending his old Transit Connect. “Can I borrow your drill, Trevor?” he shouts to the man drinking beer in his front garden, “You cheeky bastard!” the man shouts back.