5.40 am: It’s raining steadily and the reflection of the the traffic lights in the road surface reaches a full hundred yards to my feet

5.40am: It’s raining steadily and the reflection of the traffic lights in the road surface reaches the full hundred yards to my feet. Mostly all I can hear is the rustle of waterproofs, the rain on my hood and the burble of the run-off channel in the gutter. Occasionally a car tears past in a belligerent hiss of spray.

Later, on the estate of 60s-built semis, the solar panels on the new lampposts are covered with an inch and a half of settled snow and the starlings are whistling in the tops of the yellow trees. The roofer says he’s going to finish work early so he can go and buy his girlfriend a watch for a hundred pounds and the woman in the leggings and military parka says her fox terrier is much better in hisself, thank you.

Leonard Cohen has died and the junction box by the flats has started humming loudly. 

The sun comes out lighting up the green baize pavements and I knock off my hat on an inconspicuous washing line for the second time. Rows of plastic clothes pegs in faded primaries highlight the next three low-slung lines and I avoid these by bowing gracefully like Kate Middleton in the 1902 State Landau. 

At the entrance to the flats, two men in their fifties are engaged in a loud debate about Lorne sausage. ‘It shouldn’t be called sausage at all because it's square and sausages are round. It’s more like a square burger’ insists the one with the bit of arse crack showing. The one without the bit of arse crack showing counters, ‘If it’s sausage meat, it’s sausage. End. Of.’ 

Donald Trump is president-elect of the U.S.A.

On the estate where the old ladies in purple anoraks still call me ‘Love’, the air is thick with the fug of Stardrops, stewing steak and cheap tobacco. They gather to inspect the last sweet pea flowers of the year.

I pass the boy who once tried to sell me a pebble for a pound. He’s too old for that stuff now. 

I call in at the newsagent’s for some crisps but the shelves are completely bare apart from a few tabloid newspapers. The proprietor sits behind the till wearing a scarf and hat.

A taxi pulls up outside the house whose steps are littered with sodden Capri Sun cartons, nail polish bottles, chocolate coins, smashed crockery, a baby monitor, sherbet straws, empty portion control packets of tomato ketchup, a pair of nail scissors, and some kind of broken purple glittery ornament. The taxi driver sounds his horn to notify the occupants of his arrival and the man at the wheel of an oncoming Fiesta assumes the blast is directed at him. He gestures aggressively, contorting his face in rage.

Big fat flies gather on white UPVC to garner the last vestige of residual heat.