Low life | 7 April 2012

I was sunbathing in a deckchair outside my boy and his partner’s house. They don’t have a back garden, but they have a six-feet square unfenced plot of grass and mud between their front door, the wheelie bins and the road, and that’s where they stand and smoke and occasionally sit and socialise. That side of the house is a remarkable suntrap. Unfortunately the grass plot is overlooked on three sides by blocks of the tiniest, shoddiest council flats imaginable, the kind of flats the council reserves for desperate cases. Until I got used to the idea, it felt a bit public, like sunbathing on a roundabout.

But it was too lovely out to be stuck indoors. My boy’s partner had spread an old curtain over the mud and grass, and she and the baby were sitting on that. I’d taken the only chair — an aluminium-framed deckchair I’d given her for Christmas.