Staying recently in a handsome French provincial city, I could not help thinking, as I walked down its silent cobbled streets at night, what it would have been like if it had been in England. How restful is that deep, urban silence, which the young English so hate for fear of having to attend to their own thoughts!
The same streets in England would have been alive with the sound of screaming: down them would have staggered shivering, drunken, scantily clad sluts with bared pudgy midriffs of pasty flesh and bejewelled navels, tattoos on one of their fat shoulders or above the beginning of the cleft in their buttocks. As for the young men, better not to describe them at all, lest they should accuse you of looking at them and smash a glass in your face.
Or perhaps the town planners would have given the city a ring road, the two main functions of which were first to keep people from finding any way into the city, and having entered it from ever leaving it again, so that they become like characters in a surrealist film by Luis Buñuel; and second to kill all commercial activity within the city stone dead, thus leaving its streets by day to alcoholics who drink Diamond White and Scrumpy Jack in doorways, schizophrenics prematurely released from hospital into that great incubator of social Brownian motion, the community, ferret-faced youths in nylon clothes, out looking for trouble, who are social security and fast food made flesh, and a few desperate chronic bronchitics out to buy their cigarettes.
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