And they call this a market town?

On my merry journey to Thorne South Station this morning, I managed to drag my weary head approximately one inch higher, (could have been more, but didn't have a ruler on me) than it would usually be at such a post-bed, lust-for-sleep point in the day and noticed that Thorne Market Place, once a hotbed for dealers, bodgey, dodgey and old-codgey, has become a weird, almost post-apocalyptic excuse for retail.

Thorne Market Place, it seems, no longer has a place, purely because there doesn't seem to be a market for it (oh.. the irony).

Where once stood a fair old few of the old-style corrugated-roof market stands - regularly flanked with pegs, kegs, shirts, skirts, food for dogs and rolls for bogs (It was going so well there until I committed that appalling rhyme crime!) a select few tout their wares on market days on what can only be described in equivalence to a branch of Woolworths standing solitarily in the Gobi Desert.

I noted an elderly chap with several cardboard boxes, brimming with bric-a-brac, oddly crammed into the right hand corner of the marketplace, in an area where space surely cannot be rationed. The other trader was possibly flogging fish, or sweets, from a van!

So that's market day in Thorne! And to think (at the age of 11, I bought my mum a watch from that there hub of trade - a Christmas present, a watch, which claims a notch on the Powers Family record of funny conversations, due to my secretive statement  - "Mum, I've bought you a present. I'm not telling you what it is, but I've set it to the right time!")

Ho-hum