Annotations - Ghost Town

This has the rare distinction of being the only 'lost' DW chapter. Somehow, both Phil and I managed to delete the original and I had to rewrite it from memory. It wound up twice as long as theoriginal, with extra homosexual activity and a completely different ending. In honour of that, I've also rewritten a lot of the notes on the piece.
This is the second appearance of The Imperial, after the mid-60s version gets a mention in Another Girl. Here we are again, some 20 years on. The shop names and ESB tee-shirt should place us in the early 80s, along with the title which, of course, comes from that Thatcher/Early 80s/Brixton & Toxteth Riot-era classic by The Specials.
We've also seen Mark's mum before, I think. Compare:

...the stain on Cynthia's blouse, the clumsily re-applied lipstick and the cigarette burn on her far too short skirt, (Cyn in Another Girl).
He saw her work clothes, the stained blouse and the skirt with the cigarette burn... (Mark's mum in Ghost Town).

Yeah, it surprised me too, but the town bike is more than she seems, and there's a whole lot of pain in her life before she stands at the gates and waves goodbye to her son...
I've nicked a couple of place names from Widnes, again tying in with Another Girl, but beyond that, there's nothing too deep. Humbug Billy was a genuine sweet-seller who inadvertently caused the great Bradford sweet poisoning of 1854, selling around 200 bags of arsenic-laced sweets, but no-one really needs to know that, it's just a dumb joke for my own personal edification.
However.... Things take on a very different hue if you look at that description of the boys in the attic and their concerns about Humbug. They armed him, set him off, and now they want to beat him down before he gets too big for his boots. That sounds a bit like America and Iraq. And Mark gets pimped out to keep him occupied, then holds him down as he dies - Blair's Britain? So the house is the UN, with us getting royally screwed by the US, then waving our big dick at the smaller EU boys. That would then mean that the riot stricken town is a metaphor for the modern world,with all its violence and bloodshed and brutalized children, and the reason for it all? That crazy old whore Thatcher gave up on us and left us to fend for ourselves all those years ago. Sure, we miss her now that we've forgotten how bad she really was, and in a lot of ways, we're a lot like her, but when the smiling man (who isn't Jesus...) comes around, we're going to have the veils lifted from our eyes and we will see what we're doing to the world, and we'll have to decide, lying there on the Imperial steps (or beyond the Empire, to put it a different way...) whether we really want to grow up and do something right for a change.
Probably completely overblown, and maybe I'm the only one who can see it, but it makes sense to me, and I think it works well either way, so what the hell.