CLARE

Last week I took the short journey from Norwich to Clare, near Sudbury, Suffolk, which is where I was brought up. It's less than 70 miles to Clare but felt like thousands. I lived there from 1955 (aged 2) and it was "home" until my mother Muriel left in 1980. So, I spent my childhood and adolescence in this small picturesque town.

Clare boasts a wonderful country park (which incorporates the railway station Beeching axed in 1966) and the castle; the Mill Meadows which embrace the River Stour to and beyond the old weir; The Common, the site of a Roman encampment; an active 13th Century Priory and historic architecture chocolate boxes leap at.

Despite a terrible schooling, I had a very happy upbringing in Clare. The Shady Tree, Butcher's Alley, The Cellar, Rat's Castle, Hollow Ditch and Agie's House instantly spring to mind as 'haunts' in and nearby Clare. Ah, nostalgia.

I'd not been to Clare for over six years when I found the place overwhelmingly glossed up with real and half imagined wealth. This time, in such a Recession, I found the paint beginning to peel off and I could almost glimpse the 'old Clare' my parents had fallen in love with two generations ago. Yet, nowhere is an island, and on the journey through Norfolk and Suffolk to Clare - the richest and most profitable farmland in the country - I saw more than paint peeling off. The growth of rural car boots is endemic: there seems to be a car boot for every village and hamlet, and some the hedge life between! Only poverty and/or its threat really creates the car boot market in rural areas for there is an abundance of auction houses and antique shops and farmers markets and fairs for those who have.

Poverty in such places as Clare?! Am I mad? Of course there is. Even picture book Clare had its council house estates - Highfields and Westfields (the kids of which were my peers). Even the Thatcher council house sell offs couldn't actually get rid of poverty. Rather, the reduction in council housing since the 1980s has increased the divide between rich and poor precisely because a huge swathe of working people are priced out of the market while being denied low rent housing.

Yet, as you walk through Clare, who could ever think of poverty? The Post Office is now some naff cafe, while 'Butchers' (which was a general store) seems to have become, in part, a newsagents (which is also The Post Office--?!) Meanwhile, two pubs have closed and the place in school holidays seems bereft of children...

Perhaps Clare is becoming some weird postmodern fantasy of history as a museum portrayed as real life?