'You can scarce imagine how nauseatingly inhuman they looked- those pale, chinless faces and great, lidless, pinkish-grey eyes!- as they stared in their blindness and bewilderment.'

Yesterday I walked through the Broadmarsh shopping center, usually I would have no cause to make such a journey but I was on the way to the station and felt, naively, that a Gregg's 'sausage and bean melt' was just the sustenance needed to energise me for my fifty minute train ride to Wellingborough. ( I have two problems with the 'sauage and bean melt': the first is semantic, why call it a melt when nothing inside it has actually been melted? I was unable to detect the taste of cheese and beans don't melt so surely it should be called a sausage and bean slice or parcel or suprise or something. The second is partly semantic and partly portion related; 'sausage and bean melt' suggests an equality between bean and sausage that simply doesn't exist, I for one, had but two slices of sausage yesterday. The balance of the pastry was all wrong, I don't think it would be too much to expect a lump of sausage every third bite or so, I think that then you could call it a 'sausage and bean melt' without raising expectations to a level that your pastry just doesn't deliver. In summary- Gregg's 'sausage and bean melt' should be called Gregg's 'bean slice with a side of sausage'.)

Wandering the Broadmarsh was not a pleasant experience, near the main glass doors (and the light) things were not so bad, the juice bar looked vaguely appealing and the T.K Max almost inoffensive. As I made the 'Dante-esque' decent into it's labyrinthian bowels however things got a whole lot worse. At the heart of Dante's hell one finds (in the word's of Alessandro Scafi in the pages of Cabinet, issue 30) '...an iced river, kept frozen by the chilly blast of lucifer's enormous bat-like wings, (which) holds traitors in the icy abscence of all human-warmth.' In the Broadmarsh an enormous 'poundland' serves the same purpose but for people from The Meadows. I was going to go on to make a comparison between my experience and that of Wells 'intrepid Time Traveller' but instead here is a video of clips from the sixties' film version of the novel set to the music of 'Drowning Pool'. Awesome.