When the skip pulls forward, you dive into the pile. Through thorns, food, waste… you inhale dust that fills your lungs, and it stays with you. Malt, as if caught on the dock wind and gas, trenched under our feet, is all you can taste.

Televisions and furniture, smashed and crooked, cardboard, rags, wire, splintered plywood frames our sitting room where we smoke, talk, and strip down the gear into sacks.

This is our job, our purpose. We work for ourselves. We work in waves, suddenly frantic… fighting through bags, boxes — all manner of shite — looking for the prize, before resting, sheltering idle around the fires that will later burn the plastic from the wire and warm 6 yards of twilight.

We wipe our eyes as the smoke is lashed by the wind, before bellowing high over the North End docks.

Old Jack’s dead. Macca told me.

I left as the fires became the last light of the day. As the last skips were driven away, rattling their stench down the hill away to Corporation Road, prams were strapped high before the descent.

I brought home a coat, a book and a pair of boots: Dead mans boots, my size. A green bomber jacket, grease-stained and rough against my neck, that I can wash.

And poetry, love poetry, of no fuckin consequence.

Ken Grant Notebook (November 1991)