From my seat in the greasy spoon café I looked out on a typical English row of shops on a typical English street in a typical English village turned suburb.

It was a rundown block consisting of a betting shop, a hairdresser, a charity shop, a chemist, an off-licence, a tattoo parlour and, right at the end, a ‘wellbeing’ clinic, which I took to be a place selling methods to undo all the damage done in the other places.