A Tale of Two Cities - Revisited

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. No, scratch that. It was the pits. (Maybe Charlie Dickens was talking about the difference between Analogue and Digital watches when he was writing that stuff about times). Actually it was worse than the pits, it was the stench of rotting garbage escaped from the bin and lying on the footpath overnight in the rain, or the rank smell of tobacco and cat pee that some people still manage to preserve intact in their carpets, despite the abundance of aerosol deodorisers available in the later decades of the twentieth century.
(The perceptive reader will have immediately noticed the period reference in this statement - Okay, so you know when it's set, what about where?)