379 - No place like home: The guy that had it coming
Part 2 - Shopping with your kid and drive by aggression
Copyright © 2023 by Jeth Randolph
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This is the second part of this series. See also:
Early afternoon and just outside of town, walking with my son between Sainsbury’s and Lidl supermarkets. You get a better deal if you split the shop between the two places, so we’re walking with rucksacks and the first half of the shopping done towards Lidl to get the rest.
The traffic is split by the roadworks. Two lanes. There is no crossing point, just a long stretch of a few hundred meters between roundabouts, Sainsbury’s at one end and at the other, ahead of us Tricorn House, a huge, looming three block building that used to be the unemployment centre, now abandoned for several decades with smashed and boarded up windows.
Rumours of local council corruption and property contractors circled for all those years until it became infamous in the local consciousness as being associated with a local boy’s death and is now up for redevelopment into flats and money for someone, somewhere.
We’re passing the old brick Redlers engineers building which is being torn down, just a façade left and soon to be… flats, money…for someone.
Traffic drives over the bridge and towards you here at pretty high speed, only to have to slow for the roundabout behind you as you walk the pavement towards Lidl. The sound of the trucks and cars reverberates and amplifies against the high brick walls and the houses on the other side of the street and seems deafening at times in contrast to the relative quiet of the nearby canal.
We’re talking and laughing about something and I glance at traffic with unfocussed eyes and notice the driver of an oncoming car leaning towards us across the seats.