Gracey spun

   
          walking with trepidation, as one would, down Chip Wrapper Lane in Congealton, I try not to look ahead. Instead my gaze is drawn solely to the ground on which I walk, even then, occasionally slipping on a discarded sanitary towel, or puddle of vomit.

The side of the traverse is piled high with the flotsam of discarded hope and strangulated dreams, amassed of empty crisp packets, used nappies, syringes, cigarette butts and the tears of the realistic, peppered occasionally with a discarded scratchcard where somebody has scrawped away the silver foil with a comb to behold the wilting disappointment of a non winner. Reaching the dip between the two oleaginous slopes of Chip Wrapper Lane I gaze upon a suppurating sump of bitterness and dying flies. A bicycle track bisects this putrefacted quiche of misery, and trails the soiled slabber up towards the rough hewn crapstone blocks of the front wall of the greasy spoon.

Two Strokes Caff, not, as one might deduce,  named after its style of paint application, but for the amount of sweeps of a spoon used in preparation of the indigestible soup on sale within, is the erratically beating heart of Congealton. With windows muddied brown by years of airborne grease like the world's longest falling sneeze, the floor is mopped with bleach weekly, an act which barely scrapes the grotty surface of mank on the lino. The walls are yellow black with cigarette smoke, and tea stews endlessly in a giant vat on the counter, and costs 20p a cup. Butties cook in grease on a sticky stove behind the counter where the gentle buoyancy of bickering between owners Doreen and Gary, known to each other, and those too slow to move away, as Dorr and Garreh, oftentimes shortened to Ga, continues unabated.

The fat encrusted human toblerones have run this joint, as one might a dying racehorse, for nearly 20 years - a fact shown by 20 separate lines of congealed fat starting from the glutinous dado rail to the bowed ceiling. Dorr has a rugged and simultaneously crestfallen look, with a face of crumbling make up and facial hair, a bunioned lip, and whom crowns the glory of her visage by wearing a near wafer thin T shirt, sweat marked under the armpits and showing off her sagging cleavage, under which two further puddles of exfoliated grime have left an indelible stain. Ga, a bulbous and only partially continent former fork lift driver, has a peculiar odour and wears a 1987 Barcelona shirt over his fat breasts and pendulous belly. His jogging bottoms are scarcely above his buttocks, and his slippers are stuck together with gaffer tape, and worse. He often feigns deafnesss when being squawked at by Dorr. They hate each other, but would never part. Instead they revel in their shared determination to outsee each other into a timely grave.

Every thirty minutes Garreh has to nip outside for a tab. He sits on a once white plastic garden chair with one of the formerly broken off legs nailed back on at the back, which bends, but remains unbuckled under his considerable weight. Picking up a copy of the Daily Star to ogle paparazzi long range shots of long forgotten celebrities cleavage, and to read the salacious details of their confused and desperate lives, he grunts an acknowledging word, though indecipherable, to anyone he knows, mainly the elderly, or socially inept. Dorr soon screams for him to come back in as the sink has become blocked by congealed fat once again. Its time to undo the pipe and shake out the oozing blockage into the bin. "can't reuse this luff, am gunnave to throw it" he barks. Its Dorr's turn to feign deafness now, followed by stubborn disphonia.

Today there are more flies than usual, two of which have made it into Margaret's omelette. She has been coming here for longer than Garreh and Dorr have been trying to run it into the ground, their desire to do so frustrated by reckless regular customers such as Margaret herself, a tone deaf lady in her sixties who wears the same cardigan every day, and is the only person ever known to have visited the in cafe toilet facilities and returned alive.

On the wall on the left is a pin board of light damaged, stained and corner curled photographs of the couple and now long dead former customers on holiday in Benidorm in the early eighties. A few faded and food splattered business cards advertising a local taxi firm, and an offer to earn up to £100 a day by working from home, with the caveats written so small at the bottom that one would need a microscope to read them, are also attached, stapled on, since people used to steal the drawing pins and sell them to the scrap merchant to melt down.

The radio is permanently tuned to Radio 1 and plays the latest chart topping hits, some of which Dorr recognises the sound of, but is incapable of attaching any remnant of the tune to in her catterwauling impressions of. The channel sometimes features interviews with successful celebrities, the like of whom's shiny, sugar coated lives could never be found in Two Strokes, not even on a used and unwashed tea spoon.

Two Strokes opens at 07.00 every morning, providing sustenance and some humanity to those returning from a late night boogie at the nearby Crystal nightclub, enabling them to warm up with a mug of yesterday's tea and a stomach lining breakfast special sandwich - made, as it happens, with stomach lining. And black pudding and tinned tomatoes, for a bit of class.

Its now 15.00 and Dorr and Ga have taken last orders and woken up a customer who has been asleep for the last four hours, telling him to "piss off orm y gret lazy twat" in that vernacular way which the socially deranged find strangely comforting, muttering something about "the dark place" and Mother as they shamble out. The last of the bacon and sausage is taken off the hob and wrapped in cling film, then placed in the fridge, along with the crumb heavy butter and the full fat milk. The baps and sliced loaves, hardened by the heat and stagnant air, are covered in a PG tips tea towel which predates their ownership, and once the till is added up and any notes pound coins and 50 pence pieces have been gathered up into bank bags, the lights are turned off and Dorr and Ga step out into the frightful fresh air of the real world, recoiling in horror at its harsh freshness and natural odours.

And tomorrow, glasses scrubbed clean and hair gel applied to both, they will return to this crusted horse gin of misery and repeat the whole sorry process all over again. Two folks, fighting for degradation, in Two Strokes.

Yannis