Trial Run: Brain Treacle Chess Stirrup Switch

Braintree



I find that the East Anglian countryside placates as it flows past the window. It could be something in its flatness: epic fieldscapes, vast skies breached only occasionally by a farmhouse roof or a bare tree like an exposed nerve. The horizon is not too far off its own cardiogram.

After a pleasant half an hour or so, Braintree got in the way of the view. Its approach is not attractive. The buildings are made of bricks so new they're still sharp and red. Others are corrugated steel painted nauseating oranges and yellows. At the end of this industrial Vegas strip is a residential estate. But this is no place to live. Every morning pierced by the thud and hiss of pneumatica. It is, of course, somewhere to live. Someone must live here in order to keep the tyres pumped and the parcels delivered.

I take it back Braintree: your outskirts are drab but, as experience has taught me, once you get past the skirts things start to look up. Despite the chain stores' facades on the high street, the town centre is made up of some really quite handsome Victorian buildings. It takes little effort to imagine the narrower streets, under smoggy skies, full of sooty faced, workhouse children and spluttering gin sots wiping their noses with be-fingerless-gloved hands; while the sun shines on the gentry parading around the streets whose homes have steps and columns.

I liked Braintree. The sun shone and the door on the public loo still had its lock.

Next stop Colchester.