‘When all else fails, read notice boards’ is one of my self-invented rules of journalistic research.
“Do you need financial help?” runs the one and only notice on the village notice board. “Who doesn’t?” I want to reply. But there’s no one around to whom I could address my rhetorical question.
It is early afternoon on a Saturday, but the village seems empty and abandoned, as if evacuated hastily in the wake of some impending environmental disaster – an earthquake or a volcano eruption. I turn around to make sure there are no volcanoes, or mountains or even sizeable hillocks around – total flatness, with lots of Soviet-style ‘public voids’ (Owen Hatherley’s euphemism for squares and other purposeless public spaces of a typical ‘socialist’ townscape), with handfuls of red-brick Arts-and-Crafts cottages scattered here and there. And – towering above it all – four huge priapic chimneys, the tallest I’ve ever seen, like some giant sentries of all that seemingly...