Huddersfield postman Kevin Boniface shares photos and journal entries from his round of 20 years.
I’ve kept journals ever since I rejoined the Royal Mail in 1998. They consist of found notes and objects, bits of hastily scrawled observational texts, diary entries, voice memos, audio notes, photographs and film clips. Over the years these journals have spawned books and zines, exhibitions and installations, live performances and even music.
The following are some of my favourite photographs from the project. Each is accompanied by a short diary entry.
This selection of texts and photographs was mostly, but not exclusively recorded while I was out and about delivering the mail to the inhabitants of Huddersfield in West Yorkshire and its surrounding villages between 2005 and 2024.
1. RABBIT STEW
January 2005
I give Peter a lift home from Bradford. As we pull up outside his house he says “Rabbit stew for tea tonight.” “Very nice” I say. “I shot it myself in Tadcaster a month since” he says. “Aye, cut it in half and bang it in t’freezer.” He pauses for a moment and then goes on, “She suggested having venison. I said no love, get that rabbit from Tadcaster out and make a stew.”
2. MAGNIFICENT LEOPARD
Thursday, 5 May 2005
My neighbour calls round to see if I have any Blu-Tack in the house. He says he has a picture of a magnificent leopard and he wants to put it up in his cupboard. He asks me whether I’ve ever heard a cheetah purr. I say no. He has though, on the radio in Canada.
3. LADY GAGA
Saturday, 11 December 2010
A tall slim woman in her mid-forties with a dyed black bob, knee-length boots and skinny jeans walks up Moor End Road past a large snow sculpture of a cock and some balls. Arms outstretched, face raised up towards the sky and eyes shut tight, she sings along to Lady Gaga on her MP3 player.
4. THE ADELE ALBUM
Tuesday, 24 May 2011
At the newsagent’s where the Adele album is played on a loop, two men in their fifties compare their experiences of school. “When the bell rang and we were playing football, we’d just ignore it. Did you do that?” Says one. “No, not really.” Says the other.
5. SUPER SOAKER
Saturday, 2 July 2011
Mr Barton has fixed a hook adjacent to his back door on which he hangs the fully loaded Super Soaker he uses to dissuade cats from fouling his borders. He has also been shooting squirrels with an air rifle. I’ve counted seven dead in his back garden in the last few days. When I asked him about it earlier in the week he claimed they’d all died of old age but yesterday he admitted to having shot them. He said “They don’t understand death like we do” and he made a fist with his right hand and beat his chest above his heart. “We’re the only ones who know we’re going to die.”
6.COMFY SHOES
Tuesday, 19 August 2014
Up over the moor and onto the estate where the men still drive Rovers and wear their hair in elaborate combovers that flip up in the wind like busy, beige peddle-bin lids. Wind-assisted lapwings flock in the field behind the abandoned Renault camper, the pretend duck by the bin-store ‘quacks’ as I pass and a replica of a basset hound peers out from the large stone handbag in Mrs Hinchliffe’s Alpine rockery, its head bobbing on a spring. People in comfy shoes restrain small terriers, fry liver and onions, smoke cigarettes and scrape fluvial sediment from a storm drain with a butter knife. A man with a bit of dinner on his face sits on a collapsible chair outside his conservatory door. He is surrounded by marigolds.
7. PORK LOIN
Tuesday, 26 August 2014
The butcher recommends a cut of pork loin to the thin-lipped elderly woman with the frown and the large black-canvas shopping bag—she’s wearing a heavy overcoat and a headscarf in spite of the fine weather. He waves a large knife over the display counter. “Those’ll be lovely, tender as a woman’s heart” he says. “I’ll have the sausages” says the woman.
8. AUDI COUNTRY
Tuesday, 17 May 2016
On and up into Audi country. “Has anything changed since your last visit?” asks the dentist’s receptionist. “I’m drinking more more wine” says the woman in the quilted anorak.
9. LUXURIANT MAHOGANY PERM
Tuesday 15 November 2016
On the estate of 60s-built semis the snow is getting heavy when an old Renault Mégane pulls into a driveway. A woman gets out wearing fluffy slippers and a silk dressing gown with a dragon motif embroidered onto the back. She walks quickly to the house as large snowflakes settle on top of her luxuriant mahogany perm. The solar panels on the new lampposts are covered with several centimetres of snow and the starlings are whistling in the tops of the yellow trees. The roofer says he’s going to finish work early so he can go and buy his girlfriend a watch for a hundred pounds and the woman in the leggings and military parka says her fox terrier is much better in hisself, thank you.
10. LOVELY FRESH FLOWERS
Saturday, 21 December 2019
“What on earth is that?” says the elderly woman when she opens her front door to the florist with the pink hair. “Some lovely fresh flowers!” says the florist. “Oh Lord! What on earth am I supposed to do with those?”
11. BUDGERIGAR
Saturday, 13 June 2020
It’s unseasonably warm and still. The asphalt outside the post office is melting and Mrs Woodhead is chasing a budgerigar around her front room in a bikini. I tell Mr Ross I’ve given up smoking. “I’ve not” he says, taking along drag on a roll up. “I’ve lived my life. There’s nowt else I want to do. Having said that I would quite liked to have driven a pack of huskies around the Arctic but that’s never going to happen, especially now I’m married.”
12. ANORAKS
Saturday, 13 February 2021
Most people on this estate have retired and I spend much of the morning prising open frozen letterboxes to deliver puzzler books and catalogues advertising plastic statuettes for the garden, many of which light up. The pervading odour is that of liver and onions with notes of washing powder. Standing next to the plastic meerkat which sits on a fake rock with a lamp embedded into it, three women in anoraks discuss anoraks.
13. SMART METERS
Wednesday, 9 November 2022
At the charity shop there’s a half-price sale of Catherine Cookson books and two young mothers are discussing the soaring price of electricity. “I’m not getting a smart meter, Rachel and Martin got one and now he makes her get up at two o’clock in the morning to do the washing.”
14. HEREABOUTS
Monday, 15 July 2024
“I’ve been poising around here and hereabouts for seventy five year” says Mr Sykes as usual “Where are you from?” he asks as usual. “Huddersfield” I reply, as usual. “My brother-in-law was from Huddersfield” he says. “He’s dead now, mind.”
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Kevin Boniface is an artist, writer and postman, who lives and works in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, UK. He is the author of ‘Round About Town’, documenting his postal round, and a short story collection, ‘Sports and Social’.