Read Bootlegged Angel for Free Online Page A

feathers were lodged in his front bumper, where some unfortunate fowl had been whacked, it cost my mate a £200
on-the-spot fine instead of the loose change he could have got away with two villages back.
    Nothing like that happened to me as I drove down through Deptford the next morning, not even in Greenwich, or ‘Dome City’ as it was known thanks to the Millennium Dome which, once
complete, would bring everlasting prosperity to the area once someone could think of something to put inside it.
    I don’t know why I was letting Amy spook me. I was perfectly safe inside my London black cab even if I was venturing outside London and crossing the M25 which serves as a modern-day moat
for the capital fortress, keeping out its natural enemies such as farmers, fox-hunters and all those vegetable smells the countryside generates.
    It was only Kent after all; the garden of England, famed for Canterbury Cathedral, Romney Marsh (though I knew people who thought he was a footballer), the young Charles Dickens, hops, orchards
and probably lots more.
    Oh yes, I remembered, it was maidens. That was the other thing it was famous for, Kentish maidens. Or at least I was pretty sure that was right, but then I hadn’t taken even a recreational
drug for months, so what did I know?
    By then I was on the M2, a beautiful, scenic piece of motorway which bypassed all the boring places like Rochester and Chatham where nothing of interest had ever happened, and I was on a clear
run to Canterbury. This was usually about the place where decent, law-abiding citizens realised that they had got on the wrong motorway and they should actually have been on the M20, not the M2,
which takes them straight to the Channel Tunnel. Unless of course they were actually going to Canterbury, say they were an archbishop or something.
    I wasn’t – going to Canterbury, that is. At the end of the motorway I turned off towards the north coast, Whitstable and Herne Bay and the steely grey mirror of the North Sea. The
local tourist bodies probably called it the Kentish Riviera or similar. Londoners called it the mouth of the River Thames.
    It’s a coastline of islands, or ‘isles’ – of Grain, of Sheppey, of Thanet – some of which are islands, some of which aren’t – famous for its bird
sanctuaries and its oysters. Maybe it was the oysters which attracted the Romans and explains the fact why you can’t walk far without tripping over the remains of Roman pottery or pottery
kilns, iron works and even a fort, at Reculver. Or maybe the Romans brought the oysters with them as a sort of take-away in case they didn’t like the native grub. I forget.
    I found Seagrave sandwiched between Whitstable and Herne Bay, which was something the Romans hadn’t done as it hadn’t been there then. The town – and it was just about big
enough to be called a town – was basically nineteenth-century overspill, perhaps, given its name, as a place where people from Whitstable and Herne Bay went before they died. With a name like
Seagrave it should have been a natural for a Charles Dickens novel but even he seemed to have missed it. There were no oyster beds there, it didn’t have a harbour as such, it could not boast
miles of golden sand, there wasn’t even a funfair. There was no obvious sign of heavy industry and the bungalows which dotted the sea front were desperately in need of a coat of paint. The
place didn’t seem to have a lot going for it; but then it did have Seagrave’s Seaside Ales.
    The fact that there was a brewery there at all was not that surprising given that the Victorians went through a spell of building breweries designed to be solid enough to last a thousand years.
They found that, as in politics, a thousand years is a long time.
    Victorian engineers thought they had the technology to build just about anywhere and deep, thickly insulated wells to get at the local water table were not seen as a problem even at the seaside.
Sadly, they