Overheard in Boots.

“If she says she caught thrush from sitting on a toilet seat, she’s doing it all wrong.”

Walking down to town I am passed on the other side of the road by an elderly Irish bloke I chat to sometimes, absolutely bombing along in his mobility vehicle. He hurtles off up the sharp incline of Cromwell Road, leaving me limping behind eating his electric dust.

The trees on Cromwell Road now look almost primeval, with huge boles you couldn’t put your arms round anymore. Oak. Lime. Massive crowns hissing in the wind. At the brow of the hill there used to be a Horse Chestnut, magnificently flowered in May and the source of many a childhood conker. Now gone, diseased and rusted and eventually chainsawed, leaving a sawdust and a naked stump; and the road looking like a smile with an extracted front tooth.

Further down the hill a bloke built like a silverback gorrilla – arms like hams, big belly, a neck with one of Rusell Kane’s “Essex triple ripple” rolls of muscle – is drilling and hammering insulation panels on the outside of a house as though he is attacking it. Despite the power in his body, he carries an air of nervous truculence about him.

The street name plate by the car park outside the Tae Kwando Centre at the foot of the hill, pointing to a pair of houses evidenty constructed as an afterthought to fill in a bit of spare space overlooking the Titan pit, is a rhyming couplet. “Quarry View – Nos 1 – 2”. As mind worms go, this is the road sign equivalent of “baby shark”.

As I pass the war memorial opposite the old police station (now posh flats and renamed “The Old Courthouse”; which has a slightly Western feel about it to me) workers from the council are planting out dense blue banks of lavendar in the flower beds on either side. The waft of aromatherapy is almost overwhelming even from the other side of the road.

The vista approaching Wallace Road across “The Field”. More homely state than stately home.

In the playing field opposite the house, now glorified as “Hathaway Park”, a strikingly tall woman stands alone on the bank of grass, bright green in the sunlight, looking up towards the redbrick facades of Wallace Road – a proletarian version of the entrance to Blenheim Palace – wearing a chador from head to foot in the same celestial blue as renaissance painters used for the Virgin Mary – so a sort of Muslim Blue Nun. he is alone in a sea of green, and looks as though she has been beamed down from the heavens. It looks like a still from a film. The staginess of everyday life.

Things my Grandmother used to say.

On the News. “Not to worry, it won’t happen here”. On the “nothing ever happens in Grays” principle.

On illness. “What’s moveable’s curable”. Which, I suppose means that if you’re not dead, you can be fixed.

On the elasticity of the perception of time. “It don’t half get late early, don’t it?”