Problems, Problems

Hackett's, on the Dockside corner, was Formica and bacon and a notice board where a dozen decades of community had been pinned over each other: bingo Thursdays, a Saturday football lift-share, Parent & Toddler on Tuesdays, and, pinned slightly above the rest as if placed by someone taller, a cream card. MISS CRANE'S SPEECH & DEPORTMENT. BE HEARD.

Bernadette Hackett, fifty-five, widowed, ran the place with a ladle and a grudge. She sat on Marian's panel for "class and the women's side of things".

"Opera at the Grand Lantern," she said, before you'd ordered. "And our stalls round the back lane by the bins. I've lived on this corner fifty years. Nobody's called what my lot do 'culture' since the war."