Then and now

 

Subject: Then and now


It’s a newish phenomenon, waiting for a grocery delivery van to appear and replenish the fridge and It’s a far cry from the corner shop at the junction of Leeds Rd and Park Rd where I lived my childhood, or the better stocked, ‘Off Licence’ owned by Mr Farrer whose son I still correspond with and occasionally see when he and his wife come over from Aussie. I’m sure he, like myself have developed from a stride to a shuffle, that signature of old age where no amount of telling yourself to pick up your feet seems to revitalise that spring in the stride which made walking so pleasurable

These iconic totems within our neighbourhood, the sweet shop and the fish and chip shop, our fascination watching Mr Farrer slice the hunk of bacon into slices with a machine so ominous in our childish eyes as it propelled the bacon through the rotating slicer blade leaving it ready for the pan. Our equal fascination was ,as the meat wooshed back and forth was to see if a finger or two of Mr Farrer’s hand wouldn’t drop onto the catchment paper to be weighed with the ham and included in the bill.

Childhood fantasies but real to us as we navigated life without a smart phone or any sense of a lead whilst we roamed around through the woods or along the riverbank with only a couple of chums for company.
Before the age of the Supermarket, shops were often small, limited affairs and very much part of the warp and weft of a neighbourhood with everyone on first name terms and purchases often allowed to be carried over and paid on Friday (wage day at) at the end of the week. The goods were limited, virtually nothing foreign, no Asian spices, and even European cuisine was only for special occasions. It made for a societal blandness to accompany the weather and developed a sense of humour which carried a great deal of self deprecation to stoically fend off harsh reality. Of course ‘our reality’ was real and not expunged by a credit card falsification of worth introduced in the mid 1960s when only a year later Harold Wilson tried to assuage our fear of the first of many devaluations by contending that the “pound in our pocket remained the same”. The government eventually changed the name from a devaluation to ‘quantitive easing’ to disguise our demise.
The bell on the shop door used to cheerily announced our arrival and rouse the shopkeeper from behind the curtain dividing the back of the shop from the counter. Our  battle began, would it be two gob stoppers and one packet of sherbet powder, a powder into which you thrust your finger and then the sherbet coated finger into the mouth to experience the loverly fizz. Simple pleasures to defined a simple lifestyle.
The ‘collective society’ which had evolved since the end of the war coming  to terms with the large scale immigration which ensued from the Commonwealth in a pact to thank the soldiers, navy and airmen who had given so much in the defence of the “old country”, and were to break the conformity and rules af many decades of slow maturity. Heaven forbid if you offered another standpoint, that was still to come, no Twitter Page, no labelling, no search for a consensus where there was none, no the insistence that we all conform and judge each other the same, “gunga din”.