retiredmartin

September 2026. Lakeside Thurrock.

One of the few selling points for the Ibis in Thurrock, apart from being handing for Dartford Bridge, was proximity to Lakeside shopping centre and its attendant railway station with half-hourly trips to the East End. Just as well, as it’s about as well-pubbed as Carluke.

I hadn’t quite clocked that Chafford Hundred station was a half hour slog through dark industrial estates, an IKEA, a chicken run across multiple dual carriageways, and a complex maneouvre up six levels of the car park.

Mrs RM had found chicken and sweet potato fries and a glass bottle of wine in the Ibis restaurant and cared not if I spent the night in a ditch in Dagenham. I thought I’d ask someone who cares more about my welfare.

I was asking as much for a view on the likelihood of closed car park exits and lack of footpaths as the threat of a mugging by gangs from Grays, but Chat GPT gave me a cautious response;

Take a taxi ! Do you know who I am ?

You may recall I’m the brave idiotic bloke who wandered into Robert Mugabe’s highly secure presidential grounds in Harare looking for the cricket ground, and toured a Panamania port town with security provided a pre-teen on a bike with a plastic gun.

I told Chat GPT I knew the route, that I’d be home soon after 8pm, and assured him/her/them it was getting out of a shopping centre I was worried about.

Well, actually it was half-eight when I got back from Limehouse, I thought my AI friend might ask if I’d got back safely but it doesn’t seem that bothered about humans, oddly.

It then took ages to get out of Lakeside after crossing the peddestrian bridge from the station.

And then you find yourself lost in the Marks & Spencers, from which there’s no escape.

NEVER have I been so pleased to see an Ikea.