I haven't been there for a couple of years, the sun was out (for a few minutes suggesting I had one layer of clothes too many), so off I went.
Roman Road (it's straight enough to be on the line of a Roman military road, and it points straight towards Colchester, a military town from Roman times to the present day) has long been a centre for shopping, with the kind of street market that features in EastEnders, and what my parents would have called "proper shops" - independent specialist businesses that know their stock and their customers' needs. And sure enough, this particular shop had something that fitted, at much less than the silly prices in the better-known chain cycle shops: problem solved in minutes.
In amongst these are the Amazing Grace bridal boutique, Sew Amazing (no prizes for guessing their business), a shop with a signboard in Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Latvian as well as English, halal shops and Afro-Caribbean hairdressers as well as a pie and mash shop. Above it all, it has my favourite, the proper-est of proper shops, an old-fashioned family-run hardware shop that seems to sell almost anything you could want: paints, tools, tiles, plugs and sockets, nails, screws, hooks, every sort of household cleaning device and chemical - and if you want a packet of seeds, a double eggcup or a honey pig snout for the dog (yes, really), then look no further.
But oh dear, when I got to the market itself, the sun had gone in, the cold had returned. Here too many shops were shuttered for a normal Saturday afternoon; one flower stall knocking down its last bunches of Valentine's Day carnations, a couple of greengrocers, a sweet-stall and some housewares, but mostly unbelievably cheap clothing. Cheap, but not at all cheerful. Unusually, the central passageway wasn't impossibly crowded, and not many people seemed to be buying anything.
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