5.30am: I pass a house from which the theme tune from the TV show Countdown is blaring. A police helicopter hovers directly overhead.
A colleague tells me he’d been embarrassed the other day while delivering a package to a sex shop on his round; he tripped up a step and knocked over a display of dildos.
At the house with the decorative Father Christmas and snowman figurine in the window, I hand the owner a parcel. He’s an elderly man dressed almost entirely in a single hue of beige (he would probably appear to be naked from a distance). He shouts to me above the noise of his dog barking from behind the gate, “Don’t worry!” he says, “She’s all this” and he makes a C-shaped gesture with his right hand, opening and closing his thumb and fingers to signify talking. “Just like all women”, he adds with a wink.
I knock at the door of the house in Manor Street where the owner always jokes that his parcels are consignments
of heroin. Littering his short garden path are twenty-nine cigarette butts, fifty-seven KFC salt sachets (some opened and some unopened), a KFC vinegar sachet (unopened), a drinking straw and an empty litre and a half bottle of Fanta. There are also a lot of white feathers—far too many to count.
While using the urinal in the toilets on the first floor of the post office, I glance out of the open window and notice a shoe on top of the security hut at the main entrance. It’s one of those chisel-toe slip-ons with a three-quarter inch heel.
