‘Time moves in one direction’, according to cyberpunk writer, William Gibson, ‘memory in another.’ The more you think about that, the more you realise that this is either utterly banal, or incredibly deep, or both.
But my experience of the throwing open of the lockdown cage doors another notch last Monday inclines me to the second of these views, particularly with reference to one of the newest premises on Midhurst’s North Street. Like a butcher’s shop in 1980’s Warsaw, it has had a lengthy queue outside it since 9.00 on Monday morning, and the queue shows not sign of abating. Not just a lengthy queue, but the longest queue in town, which is always a good sign to an owner, and an enticement to the curious passer-by.
Far from being a vibrant new deli, or a gaming emporium, or a place of high fashion, it is a sweet shop. A good, old fashioned sweet shop. It is called Sweet Memories, which are exactly what it stirred in me when I wandered past on the first morning. The one saving grace of my prep school, once you had survived the awful food, the Latin and the and unwanted attentions of some of the less savoury teachers, was the weekly shilling’s worth of tuck that Friday brought. You know, the thin paper bag full of sherbet fountains, aniseed balls, love hearts and huge, breath-defying gob stoppers that persuade a struggling boy for one, short golden hour that just about anything is survivable.
Every day I went past, the queue seemed longer. Children on their own brandishing pocket money; grandparents, released from a year of isolation clutching the hands of grandchildren that they had every intention of spoiling stupid; busy parents whose hearts had, for one magical second, been melted into irrational generosity.
I love all this for more reasons than you will ever know, but partly because it is the kind of venture that will annoy the very people in life I would like to see annoyed- the puritanical virtue spiral crowd who would see ‘diabetes’ and ‘tooth decay’ decades before they saw a happy child. I love it because it connects my own childhood with my present, in a way that nothing else can, and because I can see its success as a beautiful bi-product of an utterly crap year, that has indirectly given it permission to thrive. I love it because it is bold, counter-intuitive and, at heart, generous.
Each day, I nearly went in, but either a lack of time, or a sense of how a middle-aged man might look queuing outside a sweetshop, always got in the way. The more the week progressed, the more it became an issue until this morning, after I actually woke up thinking about it, I cracked and went in.
The boy who left as I went in was straight out of a Richmal Crompton novel, with flyaway hair, glasses that were so dirty I’m amazed he could see through them, and a tee shirt that was so grubby you could have gardened on it. Even that made me happy.
Inside, I found an enlarged capsule of my deepest childhood memories, as things that I hadn’t clapped eyes on for forty, possibly fifty years, beckoned me from the shelves: liquorice torpedoes, shrimps, barley sugars, lemon sherbets and chocolate limes. Good God! I hadn’t seen a chocolate lime since before Edward Heath was the Prime Minister. And when I asked the lady how it was going, she just beamed at me in an uncomplicated ‘some-things-are-just-so-right-there’s-no-point-pretending-they’re-anything-but’ way, and said that she had been blown away by the reaction.
‘It’s all I ever really wanted to do,’ she said. ‘Set up a sweet shop in my home town, and make people happy.’
Well, if you read this, you did. You made me exquisitely, joyfully happy. With my quarter pound of pear drops (oh, alright, 130 grams) in their red and white striped bag, the coming week is a thing of adventure already.
Bring it on.
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