The plot thickens

Our creative writing group decamps to Ye Olde White Harte's plotting room, pivotal to the start of the English Civil War and now normally reserved for families arguing over mint sauce. Its an amazing building, with a sort of 16th century chavness about it, where all the locals double as drunken tourist guides and there's secret chambers and corridors and stained glass windows. At lunchtime, we meander through the old cobbles of vintage Hull for chips eaten out of Advertiser paper from Bob Carvers, a transvestite with "Love" and "Hate" on his/her knuckles, being stared down by a teen with Imelda Davis Grange Hill hair, outside HMV. Stepping away from the surrealness, I took off to the grounds of Wilberforce's house for a peek at the decapitated statues and the incapicitated locals. But surrealism wouldn't leave me alone. On my return, I saw a shopper being joyridden by a local teen, twisting its 20mph maximum into a twisty, knarly grotesque of wheelies and etiquette-smashing. And saw another local trying to sell a travel suitcase for two to a couple of eastern Europeans outside a graveyard - "£25 to you. It's on wheels. And it's fer two of yowze". Upon venturing into said graveyard, I have to gingerly bypass a middle-aged man drunkenly doing full-on yoga amongst the entangled seamen remains, an empty bottle of industrial strength cider by his side.

Listening: Arctic Monkeys

Reading: The Damned United by David Pease