A walk on a Winter’s Day.

Observation, recall and writing descriptive passages.

A Walk on a Winter’s Day. A Few Recently Written Observations. 

 A friend asked me recently if I still had the capacity to write. Writing, it’s not an arduous task and doesn’t necessarily diminish in the same way a hairline can recede, apparently almost overnight or reading small print requires the help of a optician, but what he had in mind was whether I still had a writer’s ‘eye,’ the capacity for recording what I see and making it ‘more than its component parts’ as he put it. He insisted he didn’t doubt my ‘manic imagination’ was still in working order and conveying a scene for a reader ‘used to be’ one of my strengths, but he suggested the recall of observed detail may be on the wane as a concomitant effect of being ‘virtually in our dotage ’ as he so scathingly described us. 

 Rude, I thought, unfair, maybe, but decided I would test myself out anyway. Yesterday we went out on an errand. Here’s a few observations, expanded to make a point, if only to myself, so don’t expect too much ‘dumbing down’ on descriptive passages. 

The sun was shining, the sky was (mostly) blue, but this was England in January and first impressions from indoors were soon corrected as we set foot outside. We were intending to ‘drive a bit and walk the rest’ – a common enough occurrence in our unstructured world. As I parked the car and alighted I was already beginning to doubt the wisdom of the ‘walk the rest’ plan as by now it was seriously windy. Coming straight from Siberia, or so it seemed. 

We were doing a favour for a friend: collecting some  documents from a chic advertising agency. A very   large, very grand house dominating its surroundings was our destination. The windows on the upper floors reflected only clouds, giving no hint of what lay behind their blank surfaces. 

Eight brass plaques by the front door suggested this building housed a plethora of different organisations. One of them bore the single word ‘Infinity.’ Certainly no shyness or reticence there. 

The entrance hall could be justifiably called an atrium. Victorian grandeur. The wind battered the old house which creaked and groaned in distress. Somewhere overhead, an ancient beam grating against its neighbour mimicked the sound of a very strong man levering a rusty six-inch nail out of a railway sleeper.

The trapped air in the big room was heavy and stale. A quick glance at the tall sash windows revealed the reason. Successive layers of paint had sealed the windows as tightly as a tomb. Victorian owners, Edwardian owners, Georgian owners, each generation had added successive layers and a thick glossy coat of Dulux Brilliant White had evidently been recently slapped on over what had been there before. It all amounted to an awful lot of paint. There wasn’t a straight edge to be seen; layer upon layer of white gloss rounded off all the visible surfaces.

We were ushered – yes, in a building this grand it’s the correct word – into a vast room about the size of a tennis court with a ceiling high above from which hung three chandeliers, the only hint of ostentation.   

The room itself was classy and understated. William Morris paper, artfully faded to mimic shabby chic, hung on the walls, soft beige carpets covered the floor and the jazz that emanated from carefully hidden speakers was almost inaudible. The receptionist had taken pointers from her surroundings – less was most definitely more. The barest hint of makeup, a demure expression and hair that looked as if she’d just left a top salon. The welcoming smile was as carefully arranged as the surrounding décor.

Everything changed when she walked from behind her desk. She was wearing what appeared to be a narrow strip of pink cling-film stretching from halfway across her breasts to mid thigh. Shocking pink. It clung to every curve like a determined limpet attached to a rock in an Atlantic storm. Advertising agency dress code? I don’t remember anything like this in Mad Men.  

As we left, clutching the desired documents, an elderly couple walked past, hand in hand but otherwise ignoring each other completely. A very thin man came round the corner pushing an empty supermarket trolley in front of him with a distinct sense of purpose. His trousers were hoisted up high revealing grey socks and a two inch strip of pale shin. He was whistling and tapping out the rhythm on the trolley handle. I couldn’t make out the tune. The trolley said Asda but the nearest Asda was ten miles away. A subcutaneous muscle under his right eye contracted every few seconds causing the eye to repeatedly open and close. A nervous tic, that’s all it was and I  immediately recognised it as such, but still had to fight the inclination to wink back in return. 

The former Post Office was now a wine bar but still looked like a Post Office. Since Post Offices became an endangered species the number of suddenly vacant shop premises had swelled dramatically. In my experience, very few of those newly fitted out and repurposed shops were half as useful as the Post Offices they had replaced. 

We were on the lookout for a café, but we’re fussy and the ‘greasy spoon’ version on the corner wasn’t what we had in mind. Obviously, our loss as it was packed. 

Despite the biting wind the outside seating area was crammed with customers. Not genteel pavement café seats, just wooden benches and rough trestle tables, but every seat was taken. 

Even though the interior was warm and had at least a pretence of creature comforts, many of the clientele were outside in the cold. Hardcore smokers, prepared to suffer any privation other then denial of the right to smoke themselves to death if they chose. 

One woman in particular stood out. She was dressed to kill in a two-piece leisure suit. A real retro number in maroon crushed velvet. A hideous outfit from a time best forgotten when the fashion world suffered a temporary style blackout. She was thin enough to be a model, but the absence of flesh on her bones was all she had in common with the queens of the catwalk. 

Her parched lips were clamped around her mug, devouring the contents like a plain wooden fence absorbs creosote. Those lips, as thin as the excuses of a serial adulterer, were garishly painted. A lipstick shade owing its existence to a fixation with a Farrow and Ball colour chart. 

A sudden gust of wind whipped between the surrounding buildings and a loose section of plastic sheeting flapped and undulated like a startled animal waking from a long hibernation.

Contiguous little boxes stretched into the far distance. An estate agent would probably call them town houses. In a more affluent setting, perhaps even artisans’ cottages. Realistically though, they were terraced houses. Simple as that. 

Along the length of the terrace a row of doors opened almost directly from the street. Even the most optimistic estate agent would hesitate to describe the width of a single flagstone, which was all that separated the house frontage from the pavement as a front garden. 

This was the last frontier. A subtle dividing line between the suburbs with their faint hint of gentility and the outskirts of the city where gentility was an unknown quantity. 

The spiral of decay had spun un-checked through that neighbouring district. Victorian terraced houses, three storeys and a basement, magnificent in their day, were boarded up and shuttered, their front gardens sadly overgrown with weeds and festooned with the detritus of a throwaway society. Even the sign which proclaimed this to be a site for regeneration was shabby and tilted at an unlikely angle.