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“The wooden door had swollen in the rain and the paint, once sunshine-golden, had peeled away, leaving large patches of streaked bare wood. He pushed hard and it grudgingly opened. A thick odour descended upon him, the same one that seemed to linger in every second hand record shop he had been in: an acrid mixture of patchouli, sandalwood and sweat. Except that this one had another sharp tang to it, really rich and rank: French fags, he guessed, like those fat cylinders of black tobacco he’d once smoked himself. He nodded at the counter: he hardly needed to look who would be there, as they were nearly always the same; men with grey flesh that seldom saw daylight, a large never-quite-white t-shirt from concerts ten years ago, and an unbarbered beard, often ginger. There was also something slow about them too, as if they lived in a world where time went on differently, a dimension that only existed in these sorts of shops.”