You'll smell it first.

Sittingbourne made bricks and paper, and you used to know you'd arrived by the smell of Milton Creek. Now it's empty shops on the High Street and commercial bins left all over the pavement. In summer the fields chip in with their own smell.

Some idiot's setting the bins on fire, too. Deliberate fires run at 1.7 times the typical town's rate, and burning rubbish is the favourite. Anti-social behaviour is worse than most. There's not a single bus on a Sunday, in a town this size, so the Brickies are stuck with it. At least it hardly rains.

The editor, who smelled it before the station