Side street

The back streets are narrow, cobbled in sections, and entirely domestic in character. Nobody's tidied them up for visitors. A white picket fence with red roses cascading over it in a cobbled alley, the brick backs of old buildings running away behind. The roses are the kind of deliberate colour someone chose for a fence in a lane that nobody much uses. They've been there long enough to take over.

Around the corner: a blue garage door at the far end of a quiet back lane beside a Victorian red brick terrace. Plane tree leaves overhead, the lane in shadow.

The particular image is the peeling white-rendered townhouse. Green-painted sash windows, a Union Jack curtain hanging in one, and on the window sill: ceramic birds. Two of them, small, placed precisely. The render is cracking along the upper storey. The sill birds face out toward the lane with the same equanimity as everything else on the street.

Marlborough is small enough that the back streets and the front streets are thirty seconds apart. The High Street presents itself with a certain confidence. The alleys behind it are just where people live — which is where things get interesting.

The ceramic birds are still there.