A new restaurant was opening on Broughton Street in the space between the two cafés that had recently burnt down.  It was rumoured that the owners were trying to decide a name that would capture the notion that their place had emerged in the gap between the two piles of ashes. How could they incorporate the sense of  ‘there used to be two restaurants in this street on each side of this building that bore the names of citrus fruit, but they were both destroyed in fires’?

TPR and I booked a table for the opening night of the new restaurant. I was looking forward to eating my meal while seated on one of the white fairground ponies that I could see through the restaurant window.

However, it was not to be. When I turned up at the time of our reservation, a Chinese chef in a blue apron came to the door and explained that they were ‘not quite ready yet’ for customers. Behind her were billows of black smoke.

It seemed to me that Broughton Street was going up in flames yet again.