Needs Must and other stories

 Probably the very highlights of my comfortable monthly routine are the Thursday lunch meetings in which the tea and coffee are not really the point but the company one keeps. I can understand what the fuss about mental health and loneliness might be about because, as in so many cases, there but for the grace of God would we all be. 

I had been concerned that today's chillier conditions might not lend themselves to the new lockdown under which sitting in the cafe is again verboten and we were exiled to the park with a takeaway. But it was fine. One ought not take such friends for granted. It's worth having a few if you are lucky enough. Their value should not be under-rated. No man is an island, etc, etc, as the greatest poet in the language once said. I voted for him as such in the BBC's poll several years ago, anyway.

 

Afterwards, I went into two shops. One can't fault Tesco. Say what you like but they do what they do and aren't bad at it. However,

 

I walked in WH Smith's like I was walking into a shop,
They had strategically placed the magazines
so mine was right at the top.
I had one eye on the 'Gramophone'
but that's about all they stock
out of the things that I might have wanted,
I might have wanted,
oh, they're so lame,

they don't know what a shop should be like.  

 

It's hardly for me to do a consumer report. The helpful member of staff was looking up details of a book they'd been asked for. It was a title by Nigella Lawson.

Was it Cook, Eat, Repeat.

The customer, a gentleman more elderly than even me, thought it might be.

Of course it's bloody Cook, Eat, Repeat. Even I know that even though it's a book I'm only marginally more likely to want than one by Jeffrey Archer. 

In the 1970's, there was a point to WH Smith. It was where I bought my Complete Works of Shakespeare, my Ulysses and I'm sure many of the more aged paperback classics that are upstairs. I know I bought an LP of Beethoven 5 and 8 there because I'm sure the two girls behind the counter gave me an odd look when I did so. That was a couple of years before I bought Never Mind the Bollocks there and plenty more records, either there or elsewhere, that were far cooler than they would know.

At the age of about 13 or so, the chance of a summer day out to Salisbury (from Gloucester) was snapped up on the basis of the belief that Salisbury had an even better WH Smith's than Gloucester. But that was more than 45 years ago.

In the intervening years, it became the Mary Whitehouse of the High Street by making a point of not stocking Gay News, which may or may not be a criminal offence by now. Its uncustomered aisles stay bleakly quiet for long days now as demand for its olde worlde ring binders, filo-fax refills and glossy tribute magazines to Manchester United, The Beatles and the English Countryside aren't the sort of things that retail outlets are firing out of the door. And neither are next year's diaries that cost £6 when the same thing can be delivered by the postperson from elsewhere for £1.29.

It's a godawful small affair how somehow WH Smith is even still there at all as the rest of the High Street closes but it can't be for much longer. And although it is a terrible shop that even I, with no pretensions to business acumen, can see has a business plan that is playing 1950's football against a much fitter, Klopp-run XI, will miss it.

In the 1990's, before Sainsbury's stocked Cycling Weekly, when I wanted to buy it before it was worth anybody else's while having it on their shelves, WH Smith's did. I don't need that magazine anymore because most of it is reviews of bikes that cost £5k and upwards and I don't want a bike. But I would like a monthly look at Gramophone before deciding to buy it. It was a quick decision today as soon as I saw it advertising its articles on the masses of Josquin des Prez and Isserlis on Tavener but I don't need it every month. For a minute or two I was going 'all-in' with the BBC Music magazine and its CD of The Lark Ascending and other English idylls, too, but not enough horses have won this week. In fact, none have.

When, as will happen, WH Smith's gets the comeuppance it has so long deserved, one of its severest critics (me) will miss it. I don't know any other shop that stocks Gramophone. As the world apparently expands into greater availability of more and more cheap, derivative nonsense, it takes these rare species with it. I will be bereft but at least I'll have a very minor incovenience to moan about if I want. Everybody seems to need one of them. Otherwise, I appear to have, like Larkin in Poetry of Departues,

               a life,

Reprehensibly perfect.