No such zone

Salty, limescaled dusk. The robin has started in the maple, quivering with the effort of projecting his dulcet tags onto the walls of the next hood. Tit flocks pass in and out, and the yellow digger today has a forklift on its nose, lifting giant cubes of glasswool insulation and Thermalite blocks over the hi-vis heads of the construction crew.

I've a mustard-yellow scarf on that Vicar Librettist crocheted for me. I futz with the settings of my new Twitter client. I order coffee for the machine. I wonder what I did with the small, neat pile of Amnesty bookmarks that the twinkly man at the bookshop gave to me last year.  

The postman brings a Christmas card that has been returned -- the same one as last year. It is a mistake, same as last year. It is for someone in Australia, but it has never left the country. I found last year's one on the weekend, in the paper pile. I don't know what I had planned to do with it, but something or other. I put them both sadly on the little heap of my Christmas cards bound for the recycling, like spring green storm-wind casualties on a drift of autumn colours.

The digger puts the digging-bucket back on his nose and returns to the ordering of dirt. A little cement mixer turns. The crew talk, pointing and shaping things in the air with their grippy red gloves. My next-door neighbour seventeen-point-turns her blue Audi into her driveway. She brushes leaves off the bonnet on the way into the house.

Soon it will be dark. I think I might go to the cinema again.