His sorry state made Julia all the more remarkable—or perhaps not, the best roses grew out of manure heaps. And despite being the end product of a decidedly screwed-up family, she shone like the sun. Embarrassingly so in his presence.

Sighing resignedly at the memory, he drove into Oakham, reducing speed as the cycle traffic built up around him. When Greg was a teenager it'd been a sleepy rural market town, home to nine thousand people. Then the Warming melted the Antarctic ice, and Oakham received a spate of refugees from the drowned Fens. Its population rose to well over the fifteen thousand mark, and all without a single new house being authorised by the PSP county committee. The town became a microcosm of English life, compressed, confined, and frantically scrabbling to adapt to the environmental and social revolutions of the new century.

Greg slowed to a crawl by the library at the end of the High Street. People were dismounting from their bicycles, wheeling them forward into the dense crowd ahead. The High Street was packed with market stalls, but there was just enough space left for the Duo between them and the waist-high piles of slowly degenerating kelpboard boxes which swamped the pavement. Greg grated into the gap with a broadside of horn blasts, and followed a shepherd driving his small flock of rotund beasts, gene-tailored for meat heaviness. The Duo's wheels squelched softly on the carpet of grey-brown turds they laid on the pitted tarmac.

The buildings on this side of the street were mostly old estate agents and building societies. They'd all closed down in the Credit Crash, and the PSP had requisitioned the empty premises under the one-home law, converting them into accommodation modules. Even now there was little improvement in the housing pressure; council and government were locked in a squabble over funds for a new estate on the southern edge of the town. Entire families had crammed into the makeshift facilities behind the shops' broad plate-glass windows, the oldest relatives sitting amongst the bleached displays like flesh-sculpture Buddhas watching the world go by.

Not all of the old retail businesses had gone under: there was still a hotel, a couple of butchers, a recently denationalised bank, and a century-old family gear business that had survived; but most of the town's trade had been usurped by the thriving High Street market. The stalls were crude wooden trestle affairs, keeping the sun at bay with awnings of heavy cloth, patterned in brightly-coloured stripes or loud checks. Animals bleated mournfully in their pens, birds squawked inside cramped wicker cages. Pyramid mounds of fruit were stacked high, every colour of the rainbow. Ranks of skinned rabbits hung from poles, stall owners languidly flicking leafy switches at them to keep the flies off. There were clothing stalls, cobblers, tinkers, gear repairers, distillers with an astonishing array of liqueurs, carpenters, potters, the whole repertoire of manual crafts clamouring for attention.