Crinklybee

Just Admit to It, You're An Embarrassment

Day Whatever Plus Five, and the green at the end of the road is bathed in a sudden burst of late afternoon sunlight quite at odds with what that nice young man on the BBC Owain Jones has been setting us up for since the early-morning bulletins- and has been proved correct on until just now- which was a straight nine hours of heavy downpour blanketing the entire North Western region. Consequently, the narrow pavement at the Garners Lane junction outside Davenport Station is, by the standards of this day and age, positively teeming with humanity, and- opting for the outer, not-recommended-for-foot-passengers side of the roadside railings, you succeed in avoiding undue proximity with either of the two joggers trundling towards you along the dead-centre of the pavement, only to find yourself very nearly mown down by the racing-width wheels of a lycra-clad cyclist passing the thin line of motorised traffic on its inside at approximately 40 miles per hour.

Dusting yourself down to set off along the (thankfully standard-width) pavement on the far side of the train track, you reflect that it is the committed fitness enthusiasts abroad in the thoroughfares who present the greatest mortal danger during these troubled times, given their self-focussed disinclination to pay attention to the world around them or to any other people who may be in it, and the consequent propensity for them to flash close by your starboard side from one moment to the next at an unseemly rate of knots, risking, if not actual physical contact, then certainly the invisible transportation of their tiny sweat droplets from their exposed flesh/skimpy sporting outergarments, thereby to alight with fatal consequences upon your unsuspecting person.

Everybody is getting everything delivered. You are accompanied slow-motion along Woodsmoor Lane by an unmarked white transit van driven by a harassed-looking Asian gentleman, who pulls up at two addresses in the same row to knock on their front doors and drop off Amazon-branded packages on the steps, and then to back off gingerly while still maintaining a watchful eye, like the man who has just lit the showpiece rocket at the Scoutclub bonfire night. Presently, householders emerge and stoop to collect, hurriedly. The first of them, wearing a dressing gown and a deathly pallour, looks like he hasn’t left the house for the full six weeks of this present business. Casting nervous glances left and right, like a squirrel atop an allotment bird-table, he snaffles up his paper-back-sized parcel and retreats into the murk of his downstairs landing.

Compared to its lycra-clad sporting chancers, the neighbourhood’s dog-walkers are really nothing to fret about. But you’re a little nervous around the canines and their great slavering teeth (and have been, ever since the ‘old lady with the Alsatian incident’ on your paperround back there in 1983), so when a mild-mannered librarian lady approaches you by the levelcrossing accompanied by a pair of boisterous-looking spaniels, you hopscotch involuntarily two foot off to the left, and find yourself knee-deep in a municipally-tended daffodil plantation. Attempting to act like this is an entirely normal reaction to the occurrence of spaniels, you clamber out, slowly, remarking as you do so: ‘Can’t be too careful!’. The woman smiles back, while making a very clear mental note to herself to Watch Out, on future daily walks with her four-legged charges, For the Nutter in the Bushes.

Onto the homeward stretch now, and that really should be the end of the excitement for the day- when quite without any warning whatsoever, a fully-fledged internationally famous rock star passes right there in front of you, wearing fashionably tailored ankle-length unbuttoned raincoat and flared yellow chord trousers, and heading for the sub-post-office. It takes you a split-second to realise that the vaguely recognisable youthful face surrounded by expensive if overgrown hairstyle isn’t that of someone you used to play five-a-side with, but belongs to the actual lead singer of Blossoms, who, if you follow your popular music, you may know are Stockport’s very own answer to the Beatles.

Failing to react with any decorum whatsoever to your chance encounter with celebrity (which is pretty embarrassing really, given that sightings of members of Blossoms are more or less ten-a-penny here in their mid-size hometown, it was only the other month all four of them sauntered past you on a crowded Platform One of Stockport Station, and no-one as much as raised an eyelid) you simply gawp in the fabled musician’s general direction for the five seconds it takes him to hotfoot it round the corner and out of your view to buy a book of second-class stamps. Still, you console yourself, it will give you a story to not-at-all-impress your teenage son with when you get home. Maybe you will leave out the gawping- God Knows Frankie thinks you’re a walking embarrassment already, without giving him any actual justification.

Fame, fame, fatal fame still playing hideous tricks on the brain, you head right along cheery Egerton Road, whose expansive frontgardens reveal no trace of your friend the cat with the black-speckled head, who may well be boycotting humanity altogether this afternoon, following yesterday’s ordeal at the hands of infant-school-age children attempting to grab him by the tail. A shame, as his take on The Prioritisation of Early Testing Facilities for The Nation’s Keyworkers And Their Families would no doubt have been of its usual illuminating standard. It can wait another day though; we are in this for the long haul, the lot of us, and we’ll all know each other’s views on the issues of the day inside out by the heel of the hunt. Whether we’ll like what we hear- well, that is another story again. There’s plenty of opinions about.

Field Trip

Day Whatever plus four, and by the time you set out across the green at the end of your road the rush hour, or what counts for it nowadays, has abated. On the becalmed stretch of the main Bramhall Lane between the Garners Lane Junction and the Woodsmoor Lane turn-off, vehicles on the thoroughfare are outnumbered by items of litter on the pavement- to whit: a plastic Lucozade bottle (standard size, orange flavour); a triangular package, also of clear plastic construction, which formerly contained a sandwich purchased at the Co-op (wholemeal, tuna and cucumber), and an empty, half-squashed silver-sheen packet of Lambert and Butler cigarettes (message from Her Majesty’s Government in bold capital letters on the front- ‘Smoking Increases the Risk of Impotence’).

In the driveways of the semi-detached section of Woodsmoor Lane, the internal combustion engines of handsome saloon cars lie idle, while their owners wrap up another week of Working From Home (or maybe also Lying Idle) in the upstairs spare bedrooms. A navy blue mini-single-decker number 372 bus, making stately progress along an-already-usually-quiet residential byeway it now has entirely to itself, fades out of view to crest the station approach and loop round Moorland Road then back over the level crossing, reappearing not two minutes later to pass you on the near carriageway- its destination display now showing ‘Stockport Town Centre’. Its only occupant remains the driver, white-haired, world-weary, and sporting the international springtime uniform of his metier: checky short-sleeved shirt, duvet-material bodywarmer, crumpled baseball cap.

Along the return stretch of your own lone, scheduled route, every untended area is an explosion of dandelions: a 20/80 ratio between yellow flower-headed ones and their cousins (parents, children?)- you know, the ones with stems topped by cloudy Afrocuts of a million tiny white seeds each. At the wide-paved junction of Woodsmoor Lane and Egerton Road, you pause by a six-yard square of municipally-owned communal lawn and count, between both varieties, eighty-eight of them. Doubting if you’ve captured every one, you move along to a more advantageous viewing point, and undertake a thorough recount: One hundred and two. A third, more painstaking exploration, utilising the ‘divide the area up into small, manageable, imaginary squares’ technique recalled from Geography field trips, reveals fully One hundred-and-Twenty-four. It’s no wonder, perhaps, that you only got a Grade Four CSE in Geography, back there in 1984. To say nothing of a ‘U’ (it meant ‘Unclassified’, which is what they gave you when you had more or less filled in your name at the top of the paper then fallen fast asleep) for Mathematics.

The near-absence of engine noise, along with the continual presence of promenading householders, conversing in twos or speaking alone into their mobile phones, combine to present optimum conditions for eavesdropping. Chance snippets of overheard conversation invite you to build their full, lurid backstories:

‘Oh Josh- that’s her boyfriend. I know! Still, it was all in the- the spirit of things- you know what I mean?’

‘Yeah- it was brilliant. Bloody brilliant. I’m doing Prestbury now- 10K. No mate- I said Prestbury.’

‘What did you say to him then?’ ‘Say to him? I said nothing, Didn’t even react. Not worth it.
’
Reaching the end of Egerton Road, the speckled-headed cat can’t stop for his usual exchange of views on the day’s headlines, given that he is being benignly pursued across a spacious frontlawn by a brother-sister pairing of giggling infant-school-age children. ‘Ah, this one is a friendly one!’, exclaims the girl, while her companion, who has his back to you so you can’t tell whether the full elite sporting kit he is wearing reproduces the colours of Newcastle United or Juventus (you hope the former, but imagine, in this district, more likely the latter) attempts to catch him by the tail. The cat, showing no immediate desire to strike up an amiable acquaintance with either of them, slinks off tail-high into the sanctity of a rosebush. A shame, because his views on the Prime Minister’s Continuing Reluctance to Articulate a Coherent Exit Strategy would surely have been illuminating.

Onto the homeward stretch of Bramhall Lane now, and into the twilight of what is now a traffic-free post-post-rush-hour, you make a tactical diversion onto the wider left-hand pavement opposite the train station, and regret doing so, as you find yourself hemmed in by a socially-distancing-but-still-a-little-too-close-for-comfort hungry-half-dozen cluster awaiting permission to enter the Mayflower Chinese Takeaway and pick up, first-pre-ordered, first-served, their Friday night dinner. Slaloming head-down between them and onto the empty thoroughfare by the traffic lights, you sidestep a discarded empty supersize packet of Morrissons Deluxe Range ridged crisps (Braised Beef, Real Ale and Caramelised Onion Flavour). Offering a silent thanks (to whom- you’re not sure) for the continued availability of such first-world riches during these troubled times, you head over the pedestrian crossing for home. There may be no exit route mapped out yet, but we’ll get out the other side of this particular field-trip, one way or another. Got to tell ourselves as much, in any case.

Thumbs-Up/I Am A Pigeon

Thumbs Up

Day Whatever plus two, and you set off for the daily constitutional into a North West in the grip of what that nice young man on the BBC regional news Owain Jones is calling a ‘Mini-Heatwave’, and you will take his word for it. The over-worked frontline staff within your inner wardrobe department, however, do not appear to have got the memo, with the consequence that you can maintain your unblemished record for the week so far of emerging blinking into the teatime sunlight in attire wholly unsuited for the conditions- in today’s case, a woollen green cardigan, a thick black raincoat, and a winter hat. Taking the first incline over the railway line at Davenport station, you become hyper-conscious of the potential for tiny sweat droplets from your overheated brow to alight upon unsuspecting passers-by with grave consequences, so, in the spirit of neighbourly solidarity which has become emblematic of these times, pin yourself tight to the metal railings separating the narrow pavement from the Garners Road junction, and damn near get your right ear severed off for the trouble, by the wingmirror of a passing Tesco’s delivery vehicle.

Outside the expansive front-garden of the semi-detached on the corner of Woodsmoor Lane and Broomfield Crescent, a greengrocer’s crate filled with varying sizes of plastic plantpots. ‘Help Yourself’ reads the scrawled inscription on the accompanying strip of cardboard, and as it happens, you’re presently in the market for plantpots, having only just this week succeeded in recovering the rickety plastic stand-up B and Q greenhouse from the cupboard under the stairs and assembled it at its perennial station in the backyard. So, ignoring the cautionary inner voice which yesterday persuaded you against the impulse acquisition of the Observers Book of Postage Stamps (circa 1973 edition), you obey the written instruction to the tune of a half-dozen choice items from the top of the tottering pile- offering as you do towards the empty bay-window a hesitant ‘thumbs-up’, in what you guess, in the absence of any learned social practice to date, may be the minimum gesture of courtesy applicable to the socially-distant transaction just undertaken.

Over the trainline again at Woodsmoor Station, a sharp left onto the terraced section of Moorland Road- recalling, as you do every day, how you were intent on buying a house on this very stretch when first considering upping sticks from the inner city to the outer suburbs, what was it now, 7, 8 years ago? From an upstairs bedroom window, a frail-looking elderly lady who may have become your next-door neighbour, if the Real Estate Market in South Manchester had operated slightly differently back then, talks into a handheld landline telephone while gazing out into what, for the old and vulnerable, has become the Forbidden Land of the Outside. You catch her eye, and a nod is exchanged, closely followed, in unspoken but mutually understood common recognition of the poignancy of the moment, by a wave.

Onto cheery Egerton Road- the last leg. The white cat with the black speckled head, who has been expecting you, emerges from a different drive from last time- a stray perhaps, or merely an itinerant? Whichever, he’s in especially garrulous form this afternoon, and you pause for a good two minutes while he addresses you in a series of lilting miaows, quite possibly on the subject of how the declining hospital death rates today being reported across the North West may mask a more disconcerting trend, the extent of which is yet to be ascertained- for mass fatalities in the region’s carehomes. Agreeing that The Lack of a Commonly-Accepted Set of Real-time Statistical Information Must Surely Hamper The Combined Efforts of the Scientific and Political Classes to Flatten the Curve, you go your separate ways. Today has not been a bad day, all available data considered. Tomorrow may be a better one, yet.

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I Am A Pigeon

Day Whatever Plus Three. Across the green and up onto the main Bramhall Road. It’s the scheduled just-past-5PM start today so you’re heading into the height of rush hour, or at least you would have been, when such a phenomenon existed, and the A5102 from Stockport centre to Bramhall village would have been clogged up across its entire 3-mile stretch with near-stationary traffic, mostly private cars housing one inhabitant each, happily going about their business of clogging up the suburban air with a noxious mixture of deadly fumes. That was in March, or as it is now known, the Olden Days. In this present age, anything more than the occasional car happening past comes as a surprise, so when the temporary roadworks traffic light between the Garners Lane junction and the shut-down Jolly Sailor pub switches from red to green and six of them sweep past in near succession on the nearside southward carriageway, you feel the blood-pressure rising at the unfamiliar commotion, and it occurs to you that, almost overnight, you have developed the approximate tolerance to road traffic of an inhabitant of the 1950s; a retired seamstress, perhaps, in Hemel Hempstead. Not that you’re complaining; this new sedate pace of life could turn out to suit you down to the ground and would possibly even count as idyllic, if it wasn’t for the… well, you know the end of that one.

Escaping the unspeakable hecticity of the main drag, you head left down the tree-lined semi-detached section of Woodsmoor Lane, which by the way is adapting quite splendidly to the New Normal, and unsurprisingly so, since, what with its quaint Level Crossing and sleepy sub-postoffice and steady succession of handsome pastel-shaded baywindows, it had never properly emerged from the 1950s in the first place. Up at the top of the second telegraph pole on the left-hand pavement, a brief but brutal wing-to-wing combat engagement between two middleweight grey pigeons comes to an abrupt end when the more slightly-built of the two concludes that discretion may be the better part of valour, and social-distances himself off to take up a prime sky-facing slot on the adjacent lamppost. The victor, ruffling out his breast-feathers in an expression of pride, lets out a couple of rounds of his species’ never-changing four-tone exclamatory chime, the second syllable stressed: ‘I am a pigeon! I am a pigeon!’.

Reaching the far-side foot of the Woodsmoor Station hump-back-bridge, you go to head right for the Great Moor Co-op/ Great Moor’s Co-Op/Whatever It Is Calling Itself This Afternoon. And then, remembering the very-possible-near-brush-with-death within its crowded, capilleriesque aisles which you recounted at excruciating length on these very pages just 24 hours ago, you stop, execute a smart 180 degree heel-turn, and head sharp left instead, along the narrowing, sloped-towards-the-carriageway pavement of the terraced section of Moorland Road which marks the start of the return leg of your regular Figure of Eight route. Heading up the side of the Grammar School grounds and approaching the level crossing, you dial down the already-sedate promenading pace to adopt a slow-motion softshoe shuffle, in the hope that the overhead lights may flash into action adverting of the opportunity of an expectant five-minute barrier-pause, followed by the gratifying rush of a Northern Train escaping suburbia for the hills.

There appears to be nothing doing on that score though, so you head on over and are exactly half-way across the tracks when the klaxon goes off, the lights start blazing fourteen to the dozen, and a sharp creaking from above tells you the lofty red-and-white striped barrier is about to perch itself with Victorian-engineered precision on your forehead. Performing a short, involuntary Irish jig on the down line, you get the hell out of there, then, the sanctuary of the sub-Post-office side of the junction having been attained, lean your forearms against the track-side railings to catch your breath, and presently, to be rewarded for your courage in the face of mortal danger by the fleeting vision, for your eyes only, of the 17:26 Service for Hazel Grove and Points South. Its three carriages between them house precisely one passenger; a balding, be-suited gentleman with a face like the winning combatant in a Woodsmoor pigeon-fight. He gazes back at you at 60mph out of a side-window, blissfully unaware of how near his private conveyance for the afternoon’s commute home may have come to flattening you to an untimely death and shooting all three of you- yourself, him, and a distraught Northern-train-driver, Still Too Shocked to Comment- onto the front page of tomorrow’s Stockport Express.

Last leg now, and in keeping with the regular Thursday night timetable, you take a slight diversion off the side of the homeward green and head down the Davenport shopping parade to join the back of an already-four-man queue outside of Bargain Booze, there to equip yourself with the three bottles of BrewDog ‘Lost Lager’ (£5.97- a snip!), the first of which will (after an hour’s quarantining on the utility room lino, of course) form the finely-chilled accompaniment to the evening’s 8PM Clapping For The Frontline. You might chuck in an extra 10 seconds of rousing applause tonight, exclusively for the gimlet-eyed train drivers of the Buxton line, and for that matter, for the unseen operators controlling the workings of its outer-suburban levelcrossings. We’re all in this together, after all.

Everything is Going To Be All Right/ Trojan Horses

I've started a 'Lockdown Diary'. The intention is to chronicle the suburban everyday, as observed during my regular unchanging daily walk around the neighbourhood- during these strange times when absolutely nothing is happening at all (unless, of course you count the absolutely massive, epoch-defining thing happening in the background).

I've got some saved up, so the first four will come, today and tomorrow, as a pair of 'Double-A-sides'. Withforth and Forthwith, then:

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Everything Is Going To Be All Right

Teatime on Day Whatever of lockdown- and you set out for the bracing government-sanctioned 60-minute circular walk around the neighbourhood which, now that you have joined the Working From Home Masses, has replaced the grinding stopstart hour (an hour and a half, on a bad day) of brain-numbing anticlockwise crawl along the M60 as the end of your workaday routine.

The route you’re taking today is the exact same one you’ve embarked on since Day One (whenever that was)- a fact that you’re grateful for as you cross the diagonal path over the green at the end of the road in a burst of Springtime sunlight which pierces half-blindingly through the towering trees. That much you’re used to- but today the Stockport climate has an additional trick up its sleeve, in the form of a brisk Easterly wind, and not just Easterly but, as that that nice young man Owain Jones will later inform us during his customary closing slot on the Regional Evening News, emanating from the North Sea coast off Finland.

Sure enough the cruel disconnect between the idyllic, almost Mediterranean appearance and the actually Nordic objective experience of the weather has been sufficient to comprehensively discombobulate a populace already battered into near-mental-submission by God-knows-how-many-days of 24 Hour Rolling Death Bulletins, as may be evidenced by the comically varying outfits chosen as fit for the purpose of a short suburban constitutional within the next 400 yards. These range from a skimpy white short-sleeved blouse with pair of flip-flops (twenty-something shop-girl chattering excitedly on mobile phone on Moorland Road), through an extravagantly patterned summer holiday shirt accompanied by unbuttoned suit-jacket, medium-weight beige slacks and faded genuine classic Adidas trainers (middle-aged male ex-discodancer on corner of Flowery Fields), up to and including a full-length double-quilted zipped-up-to-the-top black trenchcoat (Chinese female mature student or possible frontline healthworker, stepping up the pace to tackle head-down the punishing incline of Woodsmoor Station approach in the face of gusts reaching upwards of 80mph).

Judging yourself by comparison to be nothing less than optimally attired in a fetching combination of battered Decathlon running shoes, the Just-About-Smart-Enough-For-Working-From-Home brown denim trousers and a blue fleecy jumper, also from Decathlon, which has demonstrably seen better days, you descend the humpback road-bridge on the far side of Woodsmoor station and- in a departure from this evening’s published schedule- execute the sharp-right-then-immediate-left combination which will set you up for the longish stride up Norbury Avenue in the direction of the Co-op on the A6. Hiking up the thoroughfare, first on its left-hand pavement, eventually on its right, you pause outside of a selection of its more well-kept front-gardens, just long enough to take in the innocently charming detail within the photocopier-paper-sized children’s artworks, bay-window displayed as signs of solidarity with neighbours and passers-by alike in these troubled times. Amid the now-ubiquitous rainbows, a single yellow tulip, its crayon-scrawled caption in NHS Blue: ‘Everything Is Going to be All Right’.

Crossing the threshold of the Great Moor Co-Op (or as it rather grandly chooses to brand itself nowadays, ’Great Moor’s Co-op’), you remember- too late, again- why (whatever it’s called when it’s at home), this particular main-drag minimarket has fallen from personal favour, owing to the narrow-gauge minisculinity of its aisles- a feature which, while annoying but tolerable during peacetime, must surely be classified as a downright risk to public mortality during these- well, let’s coin a phrase and call them unprecedented times. It’s too late to turn back now though, and a fraught twenty minutes ensues, spent slaloming at close quarters past the protruding stomachs, knees and trolleys of variously-girthed all-comers, fourteen times up and down the preservatives aisle in vain pursuit of a cardboard six-box of Linda McCartney’s vegetarian sausages, for the love of Jesus Christ. You’re on the verge of giving up when it jumps out at you in plain sight, from behind the Birds Eye Potato Waffles.

Back outside on the main drag, you’re safely socially distanced once more from any representative of that suddenly lethal species- suburban humanity- but still a vegetable short of a full Monday dinner. So a further unscheduled stop is added to the itinerary, this time in the sparsely-populated-but-serviceable fresh produce aisle of a Shell Service station you’ve never even registered the existence of before today, where, sufficiently charmed by the exotic allure of a heap of chilled twopacks of pointed red peppers, you part with £3.60 in return for a fistful of them at a paycounter attended by a man dressed from head to foot like a Formula One slipstream tyre-changer . This final flourish to the evening’s in-home catering in hand, you return to the regular circuit, heading due West up Woodsmoor Lane, where the sight of the flashing red cross on the electric lights bookending the level crossing tells you that the evening’s walk is set to be interrupted most gratifyingly by a pause of up to ten minutes, awaiting the high-speed criss-crossing of two near-empty Northern Services, scheduled respectively to terminate at Hazel Grove (18:06) and Blackpool North (19:44).

On the home straight of cheery Egerton Road you exchange comradely nods with a handful of well-dressed early-evening promenaders evidently of no-fixed-destination, and engage in lengthy conversation with a black-dappled white cat who emerges from a winding drive of dilapidated gravel construction to miaow at you pointedly, quite possibly in doing so making perceptive reference to an opinion piece in today’s Daily Telegraph on the subject of Ministerial Failings in the Nationwide Provision of Personal Protective Equipment. Agreeing that the situation on the frontline is one to be deplored by all right-thinking citizens in this day and age, you go your separate ways- the cat to forage in the undergrowth for unsuspecting young specimens among the suddenly thriving local population of red-breasted robins, and yourself to stride the last hundred yards back over the railway line and back across the homeward diagonal path. Another day, before this is all over, you might try it the other way around. God knows, the touch of variety might be welcome enough, for the two of you.

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Trojan Horses

Day Whatever plus one, and you do yourself the favour of calling it a Working From Home day half an hour early, because after all, who the hell is watching, and set out across the green at the end of the road in the pursuance of the exact same teatime walk you’ve been doing ever since Day One (whenever that was).

The sun is beating down again, this time unaccompanied by yesterday’s biting Easterly wind emanating from off the Finnish North Sea coast, a balmy state of affairs which the local populace- or at least those few of them who have chosen this particular close-of-play hour for their daily government-sanctioned excursion into the near outdoors- have perceived as their cue to take yesterday’s brazen April flip-flop/skimpy disco-shirt wearers, and raise them by the factor of one further removed layer of clothing. A man bent over double in his front-garden on Bramhall Lane is properly going for broke, busily shovelling topsoil into a wheelbarrow while wearing nothing other than a pair of khaki shorts. If slow-motion suburb-wide strip-poker becomes another communal lockdown thing, like Thursday-night clapping for the NHS or punishing the neighbours with dirty looks for excessive visits to the Spar shop for milk, then your money’s on him- either to go home with the kitty, or to get arrested for indecent exposure.

The people of Woodsmoor Lane have taken to leaving plastic storage boxes on their front garden walls, filled with a selection of the no-longer wanted contents of their bookcases and accompanied by cardboard-felt-tip-penned messages encouraging you (as well as I suppose, other passers-by) to ‘Help Yourself’. Pausing outside a bungalow, you’re tempted by a dog-eared circa-1973 edition of the Observers Book of Postage Stamps, but think better of stuffing it in the inside pocket of your greatcoat- your own bookcases being full enough already of no-longer- wanted contents, quite aside from topical considerations around the potential for deadly diseases (or one particular deadly disease, at least) to gain entry into the familial home within the folds of such tiny, papery, randomly generous Trojan Horses.

Up at the Level Crossing, the wind- what little there is of it today- has dropped away to a nothingness, so the castaway black bin liner which you watched yesterday becoming hopelessly entangled by the gales in the antlers of the TV aerial on the end-house before the barrier and subsequently bucking bronco-like in a vain attempt to escape, in doing so risking yanking the broadcasting apparatus from its chimney-stack mooring, now simply hangs there on the side of its adopted home, limp and drained of whatever powers it once possessed, like a forgotten episode of Countdown . The regrettable decline in the quality of the televisual spectacle forces you to seek ways of making your own entertainment, you know, like in the olden days, and for the return leg of your circular walk (which you will really need to stop calling circular because strictly speaking it’s nothing of the sort, but instead a sort of elongated and wobbly figure of eight) you become fascinated by the myriad makes and designs of the neighbourhood’s gas, water, electricity and telephone manhole covers.

So much so, indeed, that you end up adding an extra lap of the Davenport Park estate to the end of your route, just so you can check whether their particular ancient gutterside contraptions bear, like most of those up Woodsmoor Lane, the castiron-moulded signature of ‘John Needham and Sons, Stockport, England’ or , like their cousins in adjoining Egerton Road, that of ‘Grundy’s of Tyledsey, Lancs’. It turns out they emanate from neither of these stables, but from –well, perhaps that is a topic for another walk, on another day. We could all- like the near-naked wheelbarrow-digger of Bramhall Lane- risk getting ahead of ourselves here, and that would not be about to end well. Funny times we’re living in these, and you really can’t be too careful.