, Shrewsbury, Shropshire,

The countryside we were passing through wasn’t dramatic, but it was pretty and peaceful. Glimpses gave interest; two old caravans at the bottom of a sloping field, a couple of donkeys, a lone black-faced sheep, a distant flock of circling birds and sunshine that rippled across the grass when breaks in the clouds allowed it to escape and touch the land I could see through the windows. In a few minutes, we reached the hospital stop on the western outskirts of Shrewsbury, before wending our way through what seemed to be a recently built suburb until we joined a road flanked by comfortable older houses where owners were listening to Radio Four and rolling out their home-made pasta while dogs called Freud waited to be taken for a walk.| Soon we were on the last lap heading down towards Frankwell, the Welsh Bridge and the bus station listening to the last whining pleas of a teenager on a mobile phone whose voice made fingernails scraping down a blackboard sound pretty damn good.| Fifteen minutes later, I was standing on the English Bridge, writing notes and staring at the river which was broader than I remembered, when a very neat man, with glasses bigger than Deirdre Barlow’s, wearing a checked shirt, soft green woollen tie and a grim jacket the colour of French mustard, told me that Shrewsbury was once the ‘Capital of the Marches’. He’d been walking past, saw my rucksack and thought I was a tourist who needed help, or so he said, but afterwards I wondered if he just spent his days circling the town, looking for people who didn’t know him. Within seconds he was in full flow, his brow furrowed as he struggled to choose the right words to use. He spoke in halting way, with random emphases here and there, that stopped just short of being a speech impediment. |With a look of pained concentration on his slender pale face, he said, ‘In this...context, the word March means a...a frontier...yes that’s perhaps the best way I could describe it to someone like you.’| He’d recognised my limitations. I was just starting to thank him for his tolerance, when he suggested we should get out of the rain that was beginning to plaster his sparse fair hair. He must have sensed my hesitation, because he added a clincher.|They call me Barry.’| It was my turn to frown...they call me Barry...was it his real name or was I speaking to the Supreme Leader of a dubious cult ....

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