Night
Out with Ghyll at night for the first time in a while. Night comes rarely at this time of year. Day was muggy and overcast, down in Leeds for an Office Day. Earlier, when I shut my overheating computer and left the building for the promise of a cold pint of lager, I was staggered, just a little, by how warm it was outside.
Now the sun is down and there’s a bit of a breeze up and the world is quiet. There’s a smattering of light left in the sky but the ground is dark enough that I can’t make out detail, and the trees are big black splotches on the verge. Ghyll keeps turning around and looking behind us as if someone’s coming: when he was much younger this gave me the creeps, but nowadays I'm not bothered so much. I still look every time.
We turn around at the dog bin and make our way back. No one would be able to tell I was there except for the scuffling of my old shoes on the dusty gravel. As if to make my point, I see a bright bicycle headlight coming for us in the distance so while Ghyll barks in alarm I grab my headtorch just to make myself known. I'm trying to be a good neighbour, so when he passes I say a friendly “yeaarright”.
Near the cutthrough I notice for not the first time the highpressure sodium lights, two of them, in front of the row of old turn-of-the-century row houses on Moor Lane. I’m in a picture-taking mood so I stop to take a picture of them just as a woman opens her front door to call out for her cat: it sounds like he’s called Tybalt, which I think is a terrific name for a cat but which also is not very probable. I try not to look sketchy, with my black dog and my phone out, gazing Copernicanly up at a 30-year-old streetlight; but turns out after all not to be very hard as I’m a pretty distinctive guy with the mustache and the denim jacket and the black dog, and the uniform of sketchy guys in this town is total nondistinctiveness, i.e. grey joggy bottoms with a grey zipup hoodie and a balaclava or a neck gaiter, oh and an electric bike and two or three other guys dressed basically the same as you are.
