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used to see the long red hose hanging down to dry – what we called God’s Condom – is long gone.
    Some things, though, remain. Down Bridge Street, past the bus station and the train station and the Chinese takeaways, the old Quality Hotel, our landmark, our claim to fame, still sits on the corner of Main Street and High Street, in all its glorious six storeys, with its balustraded parapet, its castellations and gables, its mullioned windows and square corner turrets, and its flat-roofed concrete back-bar extension and basement disco, the site of so many breathless adolescent fumbles and embraces, a place where so many relationships in this town were formed and celebrated, and where so many of them faltered.
    It is completely derelict, of course, the hotel, just a shell these days, a red, rain-soaked crust held up by rusty scaffolding poles and a big 10-foot sign on one of the crumbling turrets announcing that it has been ‘ACQUIRED FOR MAJOR REDEVELOPMENT’ , no one knows exactly what. The peeling red stucco is stained with pigeon shit. It’s a wreck, but at least it’s still there. Like a lot of us, in fact.
    Sitting, as if in commentary and judgement upon it and upon us, directly opposite the hotel and facing our only remaining free car park, are the new offices of the
Impartial Recorder,
our local paper, a journal of record, housed in a three-storey concrete building in the popular brutalist manner, with its red neon sign announcing both its name and the additional words, ’COMMERCIAL PRINTERS’.
    Shaking now, with the cold and the shock, Davey set his face against the prevailing winds and the haze of rain, and prepared for the final drag before home, up Main Street. Past Duncan McGregor’s, the tailor and staunch Methodist and gentleman’s outfitter. Past the five bakeries, each offering its own speciality: the lovely treacle soda bread in the art deco Adele’s; the Wheaten’s miniature barnbracks; the ginger scones in Carlton’s Bakery and Tea Rooms; the big cheese-and-onionpasties in McCann’s; the town’s best fruit cake in Spencer’s. Past the four butchers, including Billy Nibbs’s dad, Hugh, ‘H.NIBBS, BUTCHER AND POULTERER’ ,  with its large stained-glass frontage and its mechanical butcher forever cleaving a calf’s head in two, and McCullough’s, ’ALSO LICENSED TO SELL GAME’, with its hand-painted legend, ‘Pleased to Meet You, Meat to Please You’. Past the nameless paint shop that everyone called the Paint Shop; and Orr’s the shoe shop, and McMartens’, their competitors; past the small bookshop, known as the Red Front because of its pillar box flaky frontage; and Peter Harris Stationery; and Noah’s Ark the toy shop; Maxwell’s photographers; the entrance to the old Sunrise Dairy; King’s Music, run by Ernie King and his son Charlie; Priscilla’s Ladies Separates and Luxury Hair Styling; Gemini the Jewellers; Finlay’s Auto-Supplies; Carpenter’s tobacconists; the Frosty Queen, the ice cream parlour, which featured an all-year-round window display of a plastic snow-woman; and the Bide-A-While tea shop, famous for its cinnamon scones and its sign promising ‘Customers Attended in the Latest Rapid Service Manner’.
    All of them absent without leave. Gone. Disappeared. Destroyed.
    And in their place? Charity shops for old people, and blind people, and poor children, and other poor children, and people with bad hearts, and cancer, and dogs; amusement arcades; chip shops; kebab shops; minicab offices; and a new club called Paradise Lost whose entrance features fibreglass Grecian columns and a crude naked eighteen-foot Adam and Eve, hands joined above the doorway and Eve mid-bite of an apple the size of a watermelon; and deep, deep piles of rubbish in the doorways of shuttered shops. Just what you’d expect. A street of bright plastic and neon shop fascia,