Pinkie Brown
Wir Sind das Volk
A few summers back I was watching the finish of a stage of the tour of Britain (or whatever it's called).
The month before Le Tour was all chateau, fields of sunflowers, vineyards and elegant people indulging in epicurean delights.
The stage that finished in Stoke was Cash Converters, bookies, boarded up pubs and a street drinker with prison tats, a pencil lead roll up to match eating a happy shopper sausage roll.
It's a khazi.
I remember previous visits to Burslem. An alternate Middle Earth. A seedy looking clothes shop with a piece of A4 sellotaped to the window stating; "We sell designer clothes" always sticks in the memory.