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Basildon today, which I’ve studiously avoided for the last 8 years. It’s two steps short of being Lakeside, which is three steps short of being Bluewater, which in itself is a short stroll shorter than being somewhere decent, but traffic jams on the M25 made crossing the river a slow and tedious chore, so a turn-off into Basildon seemed a good idea.

The windows, at that point, were firmly wound shut.

I was pleasantly surprised, though. It used to be full of grotty shops on grotty windswept streets. Now it’s just the people, and their abundance of FCUK t-shirts (and a startlingly popular l33t-speak abomination that requests you ‘ki55 my ar53′) that stands between what it is and what it could be.

Still, it has a good coffee shop, which is something.

The vaguely interesting Savacentre has now become a Wall*mart, though. I have childhood memories of drinking lurid blue drinks in there with sugar contents so high they were close to toxic. The crappy clock made of bicycle wheels and metal birds has moved up a couple of floors, but beyond that, and the fact that most of the speciality shops seem to be shut, leaving the top floors of the shopping centre dark and depressing, little has changed.

All that aside, though, it’s not nearly as bad as I’d been remembering. In fact, it made for an interesting excursion - if only because it showed up how soul-less Lakeside really is.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 18th, 2004 at 11:23 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.