purplecat

Found in a filing box in my parents' house

( Pictures and Newspaper Cuttings under the Cut )

The much lamented tree at Sycamore Gap. Felled last night, I hear, by vandals who must have gone prepared. It seems so petty and pointless.

This is me approximately 5 years ago shortly after being paid enough money for a short story of Dr Who spinoffery to purchase two text books on Ancient Sumaria and a glass of Lidl Champagne. The next short story I got paid for didn't even run to a glass of champagne, but that was because the textbooks cost more.

Facebook (which I'm trying to wean myself off, but still...) keeps showing me photos of our Lake District holiday from two years ago. Which is sort of depressing.

( Plague Logistics )

This is Priya Mitchell, who lived around the corner and went to my school.

These days she's a bit more glamorous:




Despite my mother confidently telling me that British violin playing consists entirely of Priya and Nigel Kennedy, she is frustratingly difficult to track down. I suspect she is more interested in the music than the publicity. There's a Youtube video of her playing the Dvorak Piano Quintet No. 2 and a bit of stuff about the Oxford Chamber Music Festival but that seems to be it. I think you have to see her live.

A post by eye_of_a_cat made me think of the tenement we lived in when we were first married. It occupied the top two storeys of the above building. The glass in the turret was curved which was an insurance nightmare. Window glass insurance is not normally a great concern but when we had the sashes insulated, the company wouldn't actually cover for breakages because replacements had a tendency to break during transit and so the eventual cost of a breakage was hard to estimate. Fortunately none were broken. On the "ground" floor the turret sat in one corner of a large room. We had a round dining table which we placed in the window and we used the room as a sitting room/dining room. It conveniently had a hatch through to the tiny kitchen. On the top floor the turret formed an almost entirely circular bedroom with curved plastered walls (the plaster we suspected was held in place by the wallpaper). There was a bed custom built into one wall and we used to sit on it and play playstation games on our Playstation 1.

This being the height of the Changing Rooms era we had enthusiastically painted the rooms of the flat in a variety of colours. I recall the sitting/dining room was green and the office next to it was blue. The turret room was white, if I remember correctly, but we painted the ceiling dark blue and I think we stuck glow stars on it, though I'm no longer certain if we actually did that or merely planned to do that.

We sold it, of course, when we left Edinburgh after a saga involving a small area of flat roof around the back of the flat and a surprising number of buyers who dropped out on discovering the existence of said flat roof.

Via sir_guinglain and Facebook I learn that Boswell's is closing. As a child, Boswell's was the best toy shop in Oxford. My memories are of buying Lego, marbles and gaf viewmaster reels there.

My delight in Lego has never really abandoned me. I've always thought that Lego Mindstorms robots are a great way to interest kids in robotics, so I was mildly non-plussed, on a recent school visit with my robots, to overhear one girl say to a friend "Who knew Lego could be this cool?"

The marbles were peculiar to my secondary school. Every autumn convoluted marble games were played. These involved stalls in which the stall-keeper set out a pattern of marble and challengers who pitched marbles at the stores. The stall-keeper got to name a price for the marble being pitched (which equated to how many pitching attempts you got and how many attempts had to succeed before you could claim a marble). The money (or at least the marbles) was in running a stall unless your aim was particularly good and Boswell's with its extensive selection of marbles was the foundation of the whole phenomenon.

The GAF viewmaster was the 1970s/1980s answer to 3D dvds - a plastic binocular like device which allowed you to relive up to 18 images from your favourite film or TV show in glorious 3D. I think I still have mine somewhere, I certainly did up until a few years ago. Boswell's had a rack of reels for the viewmaster and I purchased many sets from it (including Doctor Who Full Circle).

I suspect I also purchased Star Wars figures there, but you could also get them at Risings in Summertown so they seem less unique to Boswell's.

But Boswell's wasn't just a toy shop. It was a department store. It wasn't quite Grace Brothers of Are you Being Served (it didn't sell clothes for a start), but it was a single non-chain store with department names that evoke a particular moment in time "Fancy Goods"... "Cameras"... "Chemist"... When I was fifteen or sixteen, while bemoaning my lack of funds, a friend directed me towards an advert in the shop window for a new Saturday Girl in the Chemist department. I inquired within and half an hour later I had a job.

The Chemist department had two Saturday girls. The main distinction between us was our role in stock-taking. As junior Saturday girl, I was in charge of food colouring and flavourings which did not sell fast (though nor did new orders arrive all that quickly), when I in due course became the senior Saturday girl, I was in charge of the stocks of plasters and bandages. Being the Chemist department we sold a mix of beauty products, health care products and actual medicines. Many of these were in the P-cabinet behind the counter since the Pharmacist had to oversee their sale (in practice this meant that theoretically he could observe us removing them from the P-cabinet). We also took in prescriptions and handed them over to the pharmicist for dispensation.

I'm not sure how much I learned from the experience, beyond the every day lessons of working 9-to-5, even when tired and that one's neighbours while behaving perfectly politely towards people who were middle-class and lived next door could actually be very rude to a shop assistant and not recognise that they were also one of the nice middle-class girls who lived next door. The subtleties of the department store hierarchies I suspect mostly passed me by. There were two staff common rooms, one for smokers and one for non-smokers. I used to take my lunch in the non-smoking common room, but generally didn't talk to people much preferring to read a book while drinking powdered tea from the machine. One assumes the smoking common-room is long since gone. The full-time shop assistants in the Chemists preferred the smoking common-room even though they didn't smoke. My memory of the few times I went there was that it was smokey (obv.) and dominated by the two men who ran the Cameras and Lenses section which was right by the Chemists - but where the Chemists was entirely female (apart from the Pharmacist himself) all of us in a uniform of white vaguely medical looking coats, Cameras was run by two old men in suits (were they really old? or merely middle-aged seeming old to my teenage eyes?).

Boswell's was not far from The New Theatre (later The Apollo). I never met anyone famous in Boswell's, but the full-time assistants kept autograph books under the counter so that they could collect famous autographs if the opportunity arose.

After I had been working in Boswell's a year or so, my younger sister ran into similar financial troubles to those that had caused me to take the job. Having always had, I suspect, rather more business acumen than I, her response was to draw up a budget and present it to our parents, who bowed to the reasonable demands and upped her pocket money (and also mine) in order to meet what were clearly our necessities. I nevertheless kept the job until about my sixth week in Oxford when I decided I had better things to do with my Saturdays.

I have fond, if somewhat patchy, memories of the place. It turns out I am distantly related to the Bentall family and I recently read Rowan Bentall's My Store of Memories about Bentalls in Kingston-on-Thames. Bentalls was an altogether grander proposition than Boswell's with elaborate events and displays and ever expansionist ambitions, but that feel of a family run business with a benevolent, if paternalistic, attitude to its staff felt very reminiscent.

Not many years later, I met the full-time assistant I had known best in Boots. She looked far more glamorous - though since she was working the make-up counter that may have been a requirement of the job - and explained she had moved because Boots treated its staff better. I was mildly put out - it felt strange to have left the somewhat quirky individual atmosphere of Boswell's for the chain homogeneity of Boots but Boswell's was never a particularly serious proposition for me. I never believed it was anything other than a way to top up my pocket money.

Bentalls also makes those of us of a certain age think instantly of Grace Brothers. Bentalls, after over a hundred years in family hands, become a part of the Fenwick chain in 2001. The age of these quirky, family-owned department stores, has ended. These were places that explicitly believed that their role was wider than simply delivering share-holder value but, as the shop assistant who moved to Boots would maybe attest, the very individuality didn't necessarily mean they served the interests of their staff better.

Time, as becomes ever more apparent as I get older, marches on. We may mourn what has passed (perhaps our youth as much as anything else) but I try not to assume this means that everything is getting worse.