Last Half Dozen

"What? You're closing down for good?" I asked the young guy at the grocer's shop today. I'd assumed that they were just closing a bit early for Easter and as usual before going on holiday were selling the stock at reduced prices. His boss had married a Lithuanian woman a year or two back - a photo of them in wedding garb at the Clifton Suspension Bridge had appeared in the local paper - and they'd told me a bit about their honeymoon in Egypt.

Mainly we just talked about eggs and egg boxes. Every so often I'd return a dozen empty boxes and depending on who was serving, I'd get a small discount. The boxes cost him 8p each so he was more than happy to knock 35p off each time I recycled a little stack of them, reducing the cost of half a dozen of the city's finest and largest free range eggs to £1. As it was, I'd gone along today for a 20 litre bag of compost that I could just about stagger home with over my shoulder.

"Oh I'm gutted for you" I told the young guy when he said that it all had to go by the end of the day. The hastily scrawled sign glimpsed out of the corner of the eye didn't bear looking at, but it instantly brought to mind the Manic Street Preachers' 'Everything Must Go.'

I easily quashed any feelings of schadenfreude at the fact that my compost was now going to be half price but I did peer towards the egg shelf and see the very last box and wonder what the feck I was going to do for eggs from now on. I made some small talk about the eggs coming from Bridgewater, but the young guy didn't know. Where was his boss? I desperately wanted to see him. "You sort me out and I'll sort you out" he'd said. I liked talk like that. And where was the beautiful Lithuanian woman, whose hair turned from blonde to black at some point?



All gone. End of a chapter. Well done all you numpties who bought all your eggs and veg and fruit from Tesco 50 metres away. Old Market and Lawrence Hill can support half a dozen massage parlours and sex shops but Church Road can't support one fruit and veg shop.

Backwards evolution?