Sto Rettem is a bottleneck with houses on the heavily-travelled road across the Slurry Plains between Lampit Orc and the Metrollops of Loon in the one direction and Cried Down and Bright Son in the other. According to Legend, the original settlement, consisting of an inn and a blacksmith's, was built by a speculator who intended to get rich by forcing travellers to pay a toll where the road narrowed between the two buildings. Unfortunately, the plan failed due to a scribal error and the fact that the developer was unable to find a willing troll anywhere.

Serious historians regularly point out that Legend always gets everything wrong - but they would, wouldn't they? Local people invite them to come up with a better reason why Sto Rettem should have sprung up in a location with no obvious natural advantages, failing which the traditional explanation will do them fine.

The Lampit to Bright Son road continues to be one of the busiest in the region - so much so that lights have been installed at the larger crossroads so that coachmen and carters can still see to get in each other's way after dark. A notable local feature is 'rush hour': this curiously named daily phenomenon lasts from just after cock-crow until the fat lady sings, and is visible by increased activity on the pavements and people crossing the road more quickly. Vehicular traffic does not seem to be affected. A new development is 'road rage', attributable perhaps to the road being crossed so often. The roadway increasingly gets the Hump, and this may be related to the Hole in the Road (see below).

Industries

Sto Rettem is famed for the House of Negotiable Affection which used to be run by Madam Virginia Snipe in Soul Cake Lake Shore Lane. Although this establishment is no longer welcoming patrons, an alfresco Solace Market continues to operate on an ad-hoc basis in some adjoining streets. The town also boasts a number of hostelries which do a healthy trade - several of them, perhaps only by coincidence, grouped around the Watch House. The most booming sector of the economy, however, has for some time been the production of empty shops. Indeed, the township's largest emporium, which drew customers from as far as Dull Witch, Candle Well and even faraway Wand Swat, was not only closed but even knocked down so that it could be replaced by a row of smaller premises which were easier to make empty shops out of.

A helpful local will point, for instance, to a dusty shop front with four months' supply of gas bills and money-saving offers on the mat and say, 'This used to be an optician's, you know' - but even before he finishes saying it his eyes will glaze over as a mist of doubt invades his mind and he wonders whether he was merely told this but the shop was in fact always empty. Maybe it was the other empty shop along the street that was an optician's? Maybe there never really were such people as opticians? Maybe having-been-an-optician's is somehow part of the fabric of this particular empty shop? Butchers, bakers and candlewick hawkers, among others, seem to have left their morphogenetic personality on these blank façades, along with iced-provision merchants, booksellers, traders in hammers and nails, jobmongers and many other dying crafts. This wealth of variety means that a pleasant hour can easily be spent on a sightseeing stroll.

The Old Village

Despite the failure of the pay-a-troll scheme, the blacksmith became a commercial success with passing traffic, and there soon grew up a clump of cottages housing the vital service industries: thatchers, newsvendors, fast-food-inna-bun purveyors, liberty stables, pig breeders, litigation agents, god-botherers, rat-catchers, poachers and the like. These form the historical nucleus of the Old Village, behind the main road, although the occupants are now less colourful.

In fact, there is little to be said about the Old Village, which is not distinguished by its architecture, flora and fauna or Famous Sons. However, it is unusual in Sto Rettem in having no empty shops. This is probably no more than an accident of History, which is notoriously accident-prone.

Local Traditions

During a stroll along Mayne Strete, the visitor can observe demonstrations of how to beg, and occasional exhibitions of bare-fisted pugilism. Since the advent of the electric railway, a popular pastime has been the game of Chicken as would-be travellers battle the traffic to catch the train out of Sto Rettem (which has always been more popular than the train in). A burgeoning new tradition can be seen on a street corner not far from the electric railway: new arrivals in the town have set up a Little Howondaland where life is enjoyed in the open air (weather permitting).

The Hole in the Road

Of course, many places boast a Hole in the Road among their civic attractions, just as many places possess a Closed Bridge, a Deserted Hospital or a Memorial Park (in remembrance of someone long forgotten). What makes Sto Rettem's Hole different is its permanency, and its ability to appear instantly in any place. Overnight, it can suddenly turn up somewhere completely different, and no one has ever seen how it moves between. Groups of hardy and intrepid holistic researchers have even stayed awake all night without success. More radical students of the Hole's movements, however, have suggested that if lines joining its stopping points are drawn on a map they could be read as detailing the history of Sto Rettem, solving the riddle of the Pyramids, or even producing an accurate forecast of tomorrow's weather.

The original blacksmith's, incidentally, is now an estate agent's. From here on it all goes downhill. As far as the next crossroads, anyway (where there's an inn (where the fat lady sings)).

D I S C L A I M E R

The above notes are loosely based on Streatham, South London, with apologies to Terry Pratchett. Any similarity to persons or places living or dead is pretty much coincidental, by and large - except for the bit about the pubs and maybe one or two other bits. And most of the rest, really. (The Streatham High Road was recently nominated as Britain's Worst High Street in a highly unscientific survey for a BBC television programme. But you get used to the traffic - the lungs adapt.)