Imagine a parade of dilapidated shops in a parallel dimension on another planet. Something very bad must have happened here - the planet may never recover - but the people who live here are almost like us - we can go and see them if you like. Look at them - they wear the same shabby fleeces, the same grubby sports bras - they eat frozen foods and drink cut-price beer and lead meaningless lives that they fill with TV in a place where the wind blows dust across concrete and one man's misery is another's family home, light-years beyond the sell-by date in a parallel dimension in time and space.

There's a charity shop at the edge of the world
In a parade of dilapidated shops
Where people who haven't got much give away
The things they don't want anymore

There's a stack of old love affairs
A box of broken dreams
Gathering dust nest to some abandoned schemes
And further on down the parade

There's a supermarket selling discontinued lines
Where the ladies at the check-out look like Reader's Wives
'Cause these are hard times
And this is a hard place

In a parallel dimension in time and space

It's only the will not to die
That's keeping these people alive
In a parallel dimension in time and space
Light-years beyond the sell-by date

You could take us there with that frown on your face
Let's go to town but let's get out of this place
It's only the will not to die
That's keeping us both alive
In a parallel dimension in time and space
Light-years beyond our sell-by date
We're light-years beyond our sell-by date

words and music Eric Goulden (MCPS / Copyright Control)

I had several actual places firmly in mind when I wrote this.
The parade of shops is in Saltdean, outside Brighton, just down the hill from Butlin's Ocean Hotel. It isn't a bad area but the shops look dilaoidated because of their proximity to the sea - the storms and salt water put them in a state where the facias constantly need redecorating. It makes them look tatty. And not many people use these shops anymore - they drive to the supermarkets instead.
So I transpalanted them to a cross between two council estates: the Whitehawk Estate in Brighton, and Kentish Town in London where I had the displeasure of living for about a year and a half back in the eighties.
I used to drive through and round the Whitehawk Estate on my way to and from the rubbish tip which sat next to the estate. That was in the nineties when I first moved back to England and had to supplement my income by doing house renovations and stuff. Whitehawk was turning into Britain's murder capital at the time - neighbours stabbing other neighbours with kitchen knives and leaving them to die on the pavement - that sort of thing. I don't know if it's got any better but it was grim. But then it always was, I remember when it was built in the sixties. It was custom designed to go wrong.
To blend in on the Whitehawk Estate in the nineties you needed to wear jogging bottoms and a threadbare suit jacket over a white vest (a wife beater as it's known in Brooklyn). To compliment the jogging bottoms you could wear either secondhand trainers or black lace-up shoes. Summerwear for women would have to include a grubby sports bra, worn as a top, over bobbling polyester ski pants.
The place where the wind blows dust across concrete and one man's misery is another's family home is Kiln Place, Lamble Street, Kentish Town, London NW5. That's where I lived for a while between 1986 and 1988. I had a nervous breakdown while I was there. When I got better I moved to a small village in the French countryside and didn't come back for nine years. I escaped the recession that marked the end of the Thatcher Era. When I came back in 1998 it was as though the country had been through a war or some other terrible devestation. I remember the times I came back to visit - people looked pasty and mal-nourished, and nobody had any money.