Hi James,

the last time we talked, I'd mentioned the old Woolworths building in my town and you'd asked me to write a few notes about what we discussed, Jeth:

Woolworths (which I know was a thing in the States too - do you guys still have that over there?) used to be a staple of the British high street. Most reasonably sized towns would have them - a large department store that sold you pretty much everything from housewares to sweets (candy) to music and even furniture, a retail jack of all trades. If you needed something last minute, you could pop in there and probably get it.

Woolworths was a shared experience across the UK – most major towns had one and it was a unifier of sorts between people. If you told someone that you bought something at "Woolies", they knew exactly where they could buy it too, no matter where they lived.

As a small kid, I stood in line and met the boxer Henry Cooper in a Woolies in another nearby town – signing Brut 33 aftershave merch at some kind of promotion – though I was about 5 years old and had no idea who he was - a giant!

I could bookend this early memory with a more recent, later life one: In our town, the lane down the side of Woolies was where “Fiddy Cent” (or should that be fifty pence in local currency?) a hopeful street tax agent followed me one night back in ‘20 no doubt sure that the old bearded hippy in the dark ahead would hand over the goods without incident but 50p turned and fled when I stopped and pretended to aggressively go for a non-existent knife in my waistband – I guess I read that one right…

The store in our town was built in the early 1900's and was pretty large with an escalator that went upstairs to two further floors. It kind of had a bit of everything, which ultimately I think was it’s undoing as it didn’t do any of those things quite good enough any more by the end.

After it closed in '08, idiots on Ebay were paying stupid money for a portion of pick and mix sweets they could have bought for pennies a few weeks earlier when it was open , just nuts.

The building then became a generic 99p store, and then a Poundland (hey that’s inflation for you…).

Its location in the centre of the town meant it was the first thing you see when you drive in . It lay empty for a while, and you could wonder what would fill it and add to what was a pretty dead town? Several floors, central location, it’d have to be another national chain, something to draw people in from outside town and perhaps some jobs? Perhaps something for young people that tend to go elsewhere rather than their own town if they can afford it?

No, after the great reality inversion (or perhaps “unveiling” of true reality would be a more accurate way to look at it) of 2020, the choice was a medical centre – the first thing that was to be seen when driving into the town would be the spectre of ill health and a private concern making money from it - our new medical gods.

All three floors are allocated different ailments - a bit like a twisted version of the Bruce Lee movie "Game of death". With physiotherapy on the top floor as Kareem Abdul Jabbar - Yep, two flights of stairs for you and your raspberry ripple legs!

Either side of the front entrance to the "Medical Pagoda" is now:

An office for a local politician or “local manager” to keep on a retail theme (the same political “brand” as the area managers at the time in government). This place looks shady as hell with cameras monitoring you if you stand in front of the opaque glass window hiding the goings on within safely behind a buzzer security system.

And the other side, a corporate coffee shop . The final confirmation of national identity replaced by transnational uniformity in the form of Starbucks.

The front space of this part of the building on the street – once an open public space where people would wait to meet up with friends, is now closed by ominous steel boxes to contain an area for seating. Looking more like an anti - insurgent barrier in a green zone, the dark metal blocks are filled inside with dirt and some feeble weeds struggle to soften the view of a taxi rank a few feet away where the zombies from methadone day at the nearby chemist, cram themselves into cabs excitedly for the journey back to flat land. Just enough space is left on the pavement for the obese to trundle past in mobility scooters.

I remember saying to a couple of trusted people at the time – "You want to see the future? Because it's here right now".

Everything you will need in one place (and you will be happy!).

The centre of the town is now the perfect example of the endgame reality: state, consumption and pharma combined.

You can passively sit like a grazing cow at the trough with a corporate coffee while the other two fuck you.