Further Information Concerning the Bus

I’m always seeing important people on the bus. I see the Sleazy Cavalier with his slicked-back hair and oxblood boots, the hint of a twizzle to his ‘tache. Now there’s a man with something afoot in his cellar. The Virgin Mare gets on at the Co-op, pushing Little Baby Bluebird in his Silver Cross pram and cooing all the way to town. Poor Sad Satchel, getting the bus to school with her mum, the two of them sitting at the front like a pair of pepperpots with matching choppy bobs. The one I call Rosie, all bulging pink Kappa and ginger-grey roots, who I like to think of naked on her leather-look sofa, watching CBeebies and binging on fudge.

Do they think of me? Do they notice me every day and wonder? Do they say to themselves, there she goes again – why doesn’t she do something about that hair? What is she hiding under her coat? Why does she only have one eye open? And what is that smell? Maybe they have little daydreams like I do, imaginary cataclysms that leave The People of The 302 clamouring for survival in a post-apocalyptic Paddock. I can spend the whole twenty minutes debating which one I’d eat first.

Huddersfield Factfile #1 - Emley Moor Mast

Sometimes I dream that the mast is my lover or that it is falling with me in its crown. It gets me every morning over the hills, elegant and terrifying as maths. It did fall down once, in the blue chapped March of ’69, and when they rebuilt it, the beetles came. Over land and through the air, thousands upon thousands, darkling, jewel, false clown and skin, long-lipped and ironclad, mud-loving, blister and snout, and to this day there’s a team of coleopterologists up there 24-7. More than three hundred new species of beetle have been discovered at Emley Moor, seventeen of which are named after Roy Castle.

They light it up at night in case of low-flying craft but it doesn’t stop the odd accident, like the stricken kestrel that fell from the sky, causing everyone for miles around to miss Bullseye. Or the incident with the ape. I can see it from here if I stretch but I only sometimes think about licking it. It tastes like a Lemonade Sparkler and if it ever falls down again, I will be riding it.

In Which Boggarts Become a Recurring Theme

I took a shine to a fat man on the 302 today. He was carrying a tub of luxury ice cream and sporting a panama hat. Clearly a terrible pervert. I got off two stops early to give chase but he got away from me in the ginnels, which annoyed me because I wanted to see where he lived. In the patrician villas with their steep, clipped lawns, where bored doctors' wives stick pins in their poppets? In the honeysuckled cottages with their bowed-out bellies and boggart tracks in the begonias? Or down in the toast-rack terraces with the likes of me? The only thing we can be sure of is that the ice cream met a sticky end.

Everything Is Going To Be Alright

I'm sure I saw a sloth last night, under the laurel in my garden, dragging its belly through the scrag-ends of the snow. I predict sloths will be big in 2011. As will tubular bandages, Beetle Drives and Pierrot chic.

It will be a year of austerity, we know that for sure. I have taken measures - the dormice plumping in the jars beneath my bed, the snail farm in the shower. Butterface is saving on stamps by hand-delivering her letters straight into my lunchbox. Even the monkey's giving up online bingo.

It will be a year of clarity and pamphlets, the year I finally win a competition in Take a Break. It's the year of the Royal Wedding and I am planning my party already. You should never miss an opportunity for high camp. It will be a gala year, you can take my word for it - a juicy, wriggling piglet of a year.

I have left out a trail of chicken nuggets for the sloth. It leads right to my front door.

Gala Day

The gala stank of suncream and sweat, sawdust and hot rubber. On the hook-a-duck stall, the goldfish boiled in their bags. With my lips sugar-crusted from hot doughnuts I haemorrhaged pounds at the tombola stalls, trying my luck for degraded bears and Elizabeth Arden talc as children wove around my feet like cats, jacked-up on candyfloss and dangerous with the heat. They queued up for the rickety rides, pawing and squalling in their little England kits, clambering into carriages shaped like helicopters with tigers' mouths and shit-brown, leering carp. The Gala Queen was a pity vote and the clowns unsavoury. It was the best of days.

Ruptures

The sweet foam teeth spilled beneath the catkins. The Valentine's bear that moulders by the train tracks, stubbornly clutching its sodden satin heart. The empty house with the lush monstera at the bedroom window. The half-glimpse through the carriage window of the Alsatian on the balcony, sprawled dead or sleeping on a single sheet of card. Two shoes among the roadside crocuses, an immaculate white trainer and an oyster silk stiletto. These are the ruptures, the moments when some secret world forgets to fasten its flies and we are flashed by the hinterland where magic and madness root.

I think of these moments on this pretty, coy Sunday as I breathe in sandalwood and skunk and listen to the children chant their antic rhymes. Snout is in the music room conjuring booming natal grooves and Spatchcock limbers up in her velour tracksuit, ready to get out in the tentative sun and start some shit. I am eating Easter eggs and drinking advocaat on ice. There is still some time to go before the Season starts with Eurovision and I need something to keep me in trouble.

An empty nappy on the baby swings. A trail of moths from the neighbour's door. Bacon on the coping stones of the playground wall. Flesh-coloured tights in the willow tree. My own little ruptures. I'll have to wait until it's dark. The monkey can't stand the sight of spring.

More Local Goodness

Dear Sharon and Mary

I love daft phrases, one of my favourites is cherchez la femme’ which is a belief that a woman is at the back of every mischief. This comes from the pen of Alexander Dumas in his novel The Mohicans of Paris, about the Paris underworld, He went on to write there is a woman in every case as soon as they bring me a report I say cherchez la femme’ – look for the woman. Dumas as we all know wrote the Three Musketeers who rescued many damsels in distress.

Colin

Dear Sharon and Mary

I have always liked to look at a sunset and see a big red ball in the sky which is called the sun. The sun is a nuclear furnace without which all life on earth would be impossible.

Ian

A Local Magazine for Local People

Once a month the free magazine drops through the letterbox to brighten my day. It advertises hundreds of local businesses, from lawyers and psychics to dog-groomers and plumbers. There are notifications of jumble sales and art society meetings and a speech at the Methodist Church on ‘Collecting Old Documents’. There’s a reasonably challenging wordsearch. The best bits, though, are the readers’ letters. Only three people ever write to the free magazine – Colin, Ian and Marjorie. I would like to share their letters from this month’s edition, exactly as published.

Dear all

Thank goodness for the door step delivery “My Milkman”. I have always known a milkman from a child in the family home to the present day, 76 years. I always think: - “If I can’t get out and about I can rely on milk, eggs, potatoes etc.” Long may they continue.

Marjorie.


Dear Sharon and Mary

Bet the kids had fun and games in the school holidays with the duck pleasing weather. Speaking of games a strange one I recently came across is called Knur and Spell. What is it? Well it’s a game played mostly in Lancashire and West Yorkshire. The Knur is the ½ oz diameter ball the Spell is the trap fixed to the ground. The ball is then released by a trigger and is struck by a player with a wooden hammer or pommel. The longest drive on record is 314 yards.

Colin


And Ian, apropos of fuck all, has sent in a long letter all about the eruption of Krakatoa.

The Pink Ribbon

Seven heads sit in the window of The Pink Ribbon, the best shop in the world. Four of them wear dated wigs and all of them bear lesions. Beneath them ponytails hang on hooks, fifty pence a piece, and a plastic fern in a plastic pot mourns beneath a pall of dust. In an advertisement for a forgotten scent a blue-bleached woman smiles at Paris. Three combs still cling to their cardboard stand. Next to the till sits an Arsenal FC annual from 1982. The sign displays a five-digit phone number. I have lived in this neck of the woods for five years or so, and The Pink Ribbon has never been open, but one night when I was wending my squiffy way home I stopped as usual to gaze at the insectoid heads of the 50s hairdryers and the endless tubs of redundant unguents and when my eyes adapted to the gloom I saw a man behind the till, staring back at me.

Summertime, and the Living is Queasy

It is hot. The heat is like a living thing, something old and ill that has crawled on top of us to die. They sky is grey and the grass is burning. In England it is so rarely hot that when it is, we go to pieces. We throng the pubs in our shorts and our socks and we broil ourselves to the colour of ham. I am trapped inside, this searing hot laptop burning my bare legs, listening to the children, who appear to be solar powered. This weekend I went away and when I returned there was a plastic squirrel in the garden. The children had thrown it at the window, the one that is already cracked and stained with egg. The squirrel now sits in the living room, another offering from the street.

In weather like this I dream of streams, the whispering water insidious as women. I want to lie by a river and have a lightly-oiled young lovely feed me greengages and figs as I watch lions get fucked by lambs and read strange poetry to the bees and later, under lanterns and a grinning moon, slide naked into the water and overpower the pike. As it is, I will have to make do with a Lemonade Sparkler and a cold bath.

Suffer the Little Children

Yesterday afternoon, due to a slight meltdown on my part, LoH and I were drinking wine in an impromptu picnic area we had erected behind the bins. The magpies were clattering like football rattles from the chimneys all around, Spatchcock was eating the coriander and the sweet breeze tempered the mugging sun. We sat and smoked and soaked and supped and smiled with our eyes shut until we heard the voices of the local children, one screaming gleefully “Who’s had sex?” and the others hollering “Me! Meeee!”

Today my brain is being a little bastard, walking up the walls and scratching at the ceiling, picking and flicking and faffing with its socks. It wants to go outside and stuff its pockets with crab apples and toads, but it has to stay inside and sit quietly with its hands on its head. Later I will reward it with a stroll to the shop to buy tobacco and cheese and Hundreds and Thousands, but there are many words to go before we can rest.

Fall Forward

The best sight in the world is blue sky through the bottom of a pint glass. The clocks went forward last night and today we went adventuring. We drank beside the canal and watched the barges pass, smoking rollies and sharing packets of dry-roasted in the optimistic sun. Soon it will be time for night cricket, tea-dresses and the Eurovision. When Eurovision comes, the Best Girl and I will dress as drag queens and I will serve pink gin from porcelain teapots. First stop though is the Grand National. My money is on War of Attrition.

The police came round again last night. The children had been systematically destroying the abandoned van over the road. I had heard them at it, and if I were a more upstanding member of society I would have called the police myself, but seeing as how I break several laws just sitting still, I thought it unwise. Poor, stoned Snout opened the door and bamboozled the pretty, blonde, twelve-year-old constable with a detailed history of the vans he has seen on this road and on other roads in the past. The Lover of Horses, Brother Mine and I hid in the W.C. Snout said enough to make her go away but not enough to get the children in trouble. We are more afraid of the children than we are of the law. Later some men came in a lorry, took the van to pieces and carried it away. No sign of the cat with the human face, but no doubt it wasn’t far away.

Now I am here, garlic-fingered in other people’s clothes, lying on my belly with my bare feet in the air like a teenage girl writing in her secret diary. I am the kind of person who would read your diary if I found it. I am the kind of person who, left alone in your house, would heft your mattress and rummage through your knicker drawer until I found your diary. I love secrets, especially other people’s, and I sit upon my clutch of them henlike, overprotective and broody for more.

Home Sweet Home

Last night I ate fishes with my man Snout. We drank wine and watched a man on the television sew the back end of a goose onto the front end of a pig. Spatchcock the cat came and groomed Snout’s beard. We had the house to ourselves and we sprawled on the sofa and feasted.

Yesterday afternoon the police came to the scruffy-looking rental house over the road, four officers who all looked fresh from sixth-form college. They called for a skip and began carting out hydroponic kit, fans, lights and ventilation tubes. They filled their cars with yellow evidence boxes. In two hours it was all over. I have never even noticed who lives there. If only we had known, we could have staged an advance raid. It was very exciting, all the neighbours came out to watch.

There is always something interesting happening on this street. I am sure that the house with the green door is a brothel – I keep seeing brutal looking men and blasted, skinny women coming and going. The gangs of children keep things interesting, and guarantee a police intervention every few months. There is a little old man who wears a shell-suit and a bobble-hat and drives a Segway up and down the road. Then, of course, there is the cat with the human face, and once, when I was working in the next town over, I plunged myself into the frigid sinkhole of a Monday morning, the streets wet and the stars still staring, and, hearing something skittering behind me I turned and found myself being followed down the street by a semi-flaccid purple balloon. That one unnerved me, I can tell you. I had to spend my lunch-break hunting magpies and tying them together for luck.