Trial Run: Brain Treacle Chess Stirrup Switch (Cont'd)

Colchester

Braintree to Colchester on the 70 was a rattler. Another double decker like the 93A before it. The synchromesh was shot. Either that or the driver couldn't work out what the third pedal was for, "That's the go-faster one and that's the slow-down one, but I'm buggered if I can remember what that one on the left does."

The bus's voice was a throaty growl. You could feel its complaint shaking into you through the seat. It was like tiring just from watching hard labour, sympathetic exhaustion for Sisyphus.

At one point an old couple alighted and, as the bus pulled away, I noticed they had left a prescription on their seat. I grabbed it and asked the driver to pull over again. As I stood in the bus's doorway holding the prescription up and calling out to the couple, the opening of The Untouchables flashed into my head, the little girl being blown up by a Mafioso's suitcase bomb. Is that a sign of our security conscious times, or some deep-seated mistrust in my own mind?

The couple were surprised and very thankful. I felt a pang of community spirit and immediately tried to shoehorn this event's relevance into the overall spirit of my trip. Silly really. It's just a thing that happened. What was nice, though, was that as I turned around, the driver gave me a single pat on my arm and nodded his head. It was like a moment between a son and his taciturn father who knows only this way to express his pride.

Colchester's town centre is a depressing place. Depressing inasmuch as the main high street is nothing but a chain of chains. There is a network of little streets that comes off the high street. In amongst these smaller lanes are some interesting shops, but most of them aspiring to their bullyish big corporate brothers. There is apparently nothing to eat here except kebabs and fried chicken. Anyone'd think you were in Hackney.

I didn't like Colchester so much. The towns seemed to be getting steadily worse since my first stop in Ongar. I couldn't work this out, seeing as I was getting closer to Norfolk. Then it struck me, I was also getting closer to...

Ipswich.