Next door the lads have started digging. That’s an organised neighbour. Liz and Luke are away for a fortnight so they brought in the digger and a skip. Who knows what they’re up to but they’re up to it now.
I sat in the window and openly watched them work over a cup of tea. The driver clocked me. I mimed pulling a ring pull and he smiled recognition. The neighbour’s kids were watching him work too. It’s interesting watching a man work a digger and he worked it with skill in a confined space.
It was cold enough at night that I’m putting on a duvet. That’s unfamiliar after the summer we have had.
So yeah. This is what I’m doing now. Looking after creatures and a home and winding down as I go.
Nothing is open in town on a Tuesday, but I drove into ALDI. “Oh here we go, look,” says an old white guy to his wife as I walk by. He ends up behind me in the queue and he is making small talk which I’m not great at but I’m trying and my accent likely pacifies him as it is similar to his but he still can’t help asking “you’re not from round here are you?” There’s no malice in it. I’ve got a big bushy beard again, I’m in the look where a renowned agent literally said to me: “Go and live in Afghanistan or you know somewhere and learn Arabic and you’ll never stop working”. I’m a benign middle class male creative currently looking after fluffy creatures in The Peak District but apparently I look like Osama bin Laden.
I have done some scouting of the local area but largely I’ve stayed put. I want the cat and the neighbours to trust my presence beard or no beard. The neighbours are right on top of us. Their kids go play on the trampoline in the evening. An old guy is growing tomatoes in the greenhouse, this is shared space , brilliantly and as it should be. And there’s no physical divide between the properties at the moment at all because of the works.
The first time I met my neighbour Jo, I kid you not, I sat down in what I thought was a private chair overlooking the garden and put my hands down the front of my trousers to adjust my bollocks – nobody wants to pull them down – and suddenly she was there looking and smiling at me as I extracted my hand from my trousers.
That’ll be all over the village by now. She pretended she hadn’t noticed.
It’s lovely being here but it is also nothing. I have learnt to be close to the job. That’s why I still persist with London. It’s so easy to be forgotten. I like it here but the machine is elsewhere.
Right now though the machine is in Edinburgh and so is my agent so… fuck it, this is a shot at stillness. I wouldn’t want to be doing Shakespeare in a garden for acorns right now anyway. I’m happy to just breathe. I needed this. I’m very happy that Liz needed someone to watch the fluff.
