Saturday 21 December 2013

The old man with the bag-4-life and the beige anorak didn’t have his hair styled in an incongruous mohican…



The old man with the bag-for-life and the beige anorak hasn’t got a mohican hairstyle, it's a shadow cast by the lamppost across his bald head by the low winter sun.

The sky blows from black to blue and back again: leaves, jackdaws, Tesco bags, starlings and fieldfares windswept under brief rainbows.

All morning, the police helicopter has been hovering above the estate where armed police are shouting at a man in a t-shirt decorated with distressed appliqué text.

At the other end of the road, the young woman with the big afro is reading a psychology textbook while two fat men in black satin shirts, elaborate tattoos, shiny grey slacks and light tan, chisel-toe mock-crocodile shoes carry large boxes into her house and call her darling.

A few doors up, a man with a strong eastern European accent explains from an upstairs window why he can’t open his front door, “I bought a couch. It is too big. I can’t open the door”.

The contents of the next house down have been dumped in miry puddles in the front garden: a pair of Ugg boots, a hi-fi system, a two-foot-tall vase, an upside-down sofa...

I park up next to a discarded boat and drink coffee from a flask while a man smoking weed with his coat only half on, takes his small daughter to the newsagent in her reindeer onesie.