Y-reg Chevette

I signed on again today and got home to find a £47.30 dole cheque waiting for me. My overdraft now stands at £77. I also bought Mum a card and present in Farnshaw; she’s forty nine today.

I got a letter from Shelley who's very busy in Watermouth. She has a job at Kentucky Fried Chicken. Penny has a temporary job as a receptionist in a psychiatric unit which, predictably, “is cracking her up.”

I started a library book on Nietzsche but did so with little-to-no-enthusiasm. I aborted it a half-dozen pages in. I’m suffering through a state of majestic boredom, an almost irretrievable state of brain death.

Outside in the nightmare suburb, everything’s frozen into an afternoon calm; the petty little domestic rituals and the soft sound of the garden hoe are the only evidence of human activity. No strife, no “anti-social” behaviour permeates this self-satisfied little world of privet hedges and Y-reg Chevettes.

Easterby is a shit-heap and doesn't raise its sights above its own red-tiled rooftops. But then I suppose the whole country is the same.