Going Green...grocer!

That'll be £37 and 93 pence please.

When I were a lad way back before t'days of hypermarkets, convenience stores, online shopping and t'like, a trip to the greengrocers was an almost daily ordeal and one to be feared. And since it was in norh east London,  not Yorkshire, I'll drop the Monty Python northern hardship nostalgia accent.

   "Just nip up the road and get twelve pound of potatoes, two of cooking apples, three big onions, a head of cabbage and some carrots from Charlie's," Mum would look up from her endless washing, ironing, cleaning to ask."Ooh and tell him to put it on the slate." The words struck fear into a young heart.

      Charlie was a blubbery man mountain who  ran the greengrocers on the next block. With a checked flat cap permanently attached to his head and a greasy stained apron of inderminate dark, colour : a sort of blue-grey-brown-black, girding his rather-more-than-ample loins, he was a formidable figure. A hand rolled cigarette was often seen hanging from the corner of his mouth, allowing him still to talk in a low gravelly, rasping voice that attested the power of tar and nictoine on the human frame.

    Charlie had never been caught smiling and the sight of children seemed to stoke his habitual gruffness further. We might have feared him more if we didn't know how slowly he moved and how easily we could get away if necessary.

 "Wort you want boy?!" He'd snarl ,"Come on, I ain't gort all day!"

   That was plainly untrue.  He had nothing else to do with his time but sell vegetables, but baiting children seemed to provide a bit of a variety from conversing with sprouts, runner beans and greying cauliflowers. The shop was dark and exuded an air of miserable menace, rather like its owner.  There was no self-service in Charlie's shop, not for kids anyway.

  "Cookers?" He'd turn over a few decent apples at the top of the crate and delve down for some suitably bruised and beaten specimens.
   "Lovely collie that is" he'd say  daring you with his eyes to tell him you wanted one of the fresher ones as he thrust it into the big rapidly filling shopping bag.
"Have you ever seen better bananas?" he offered, knowing the answer was an affirmative which dare not speak its name.
  
    His big, red, gurning face loosely resembled the potatoes he threw roughly onto the weighing scales, except he wasn't covered in mud. Mum said he sold them like that so you had to pay for the soil too. He was generally believed to overcharge and to give short measure when he could get away with it. Nobody had a good word for Charlie, not even mum who saw the best in everyone. She couldn't buy the veg herself, not until dad's pay packet had made a dent in the debt we owed him.

   Charlie saved his best for last. At the expected mention of the word "tick"," slate" or "credit" his big, bulky frame would rock backwards his eyes would roll to heaven and a series of  rumbling, almost incoherent noises would rise up like a slow, pained earthquake gatheirng pace.

  "Bloody cheek...what's the world coming too...honest man can't make a living...got bills to pay y'know...
can't  give  the stuff away free...people today...repsonsibilities...somefink for nuffink... "
It always ended with his own particular amen: " Go orn, geddout of 'ere 'fore you feel my boot!" No bill was ever discussed and Charlie presumably took the liberty of deciding for himself how much the transaction was worth, adding the number he first thought of and then increasing the amount owed accordingly.
   
      I thought of Charlie the other day.  I was standing outside the organic greengrocer's which opened in our locale a while ago and has been expanding ever since. It's  now a coffee shop and a cafe and a deli and it 'll shortly be a kindergarten, Steiner  school and a yoghurt-knitting factory.  It's a great  success.

      The last time the coop was short of  veg I popped in and bought  a single bruised tomato for 97p. Of  course it has to cost that much because each tomato is hand reared by a buddhist monk who gives it a name, nurtures and educates it and teaches it the wisdom of accepting its lot and of being the most perfect and flavoursome  tomato it can possibly be.  Oddly enough, I couldn't tell the difference from his lowly coop cousins, but then I am one of the truly unenlightened. My wife once won a £50 voucher for  this shop  in the local school raffle: it didn't fill a single recycled carrier bag, but the Nicaraguan 90% fair trade dark chocolate was surprisingly... like other chocolate only more expensive.

    As I stood in the queue I heard the following exchange coming from a couple of organic skinnylatte fatties in garish peasant garb of the labelled variety.
    "Never go anywhere else now"
    "Marvellous"
     "Costs a little more but you get what you pay for"
     "Fabulous"
     "Everyone comes here now: Jocasta, Jessica, Jambalaya, Hugo, Mego, Wego, simply everyone!"
     "Super"
     "People drive miles out of their way to come here. You have to don't you?"
This last struck me as a trifle environmentally questionable but hey, live and let rot I always say.
      
     The reason Charlie came to my mind was that the vegetables looked familiar, possibly the great great great great grand progeny of Charlie's mud covered potatoes, bent carrots, black bananas, collapsing mushrooms and grey cauliflowers; nothing like the nice, clean, cheaper  produce on offer fifty yards away. But where Charlie nickeled and dimed his customers this lot were fiver and tennering them. This was vegetative larceny on a scale of which  poor old Charlie had never even contemplated and the customers loved it!  How on earth could they get away with it? Simple, instead of Charlie, they employed a series of fresh faced, lissom, young women with flowing hair and vowels, all tall enough, even in flat court shoes, to join the constabulary; each one with a smile and a figure that could be a preview of heaven and a voice like soothing music.

  These succcubi weave their spell on the comfortably self important, those with too much time and money on their hands. The gilrs willingly sympathise with the difficulty of getting good nannies, scullery maids and chimney boys; they explain, in great details, the fascinating intricacies of  the trade route which brought these specific mung beans right here to this very shop, just for you; they will agree that your child/children is/are a musical/scientific/literary/artistic/mathmatical prodigy or all of the above. They will fulfil your every wish, except those of a lewd and personal nature.  By the time they have finished, you (not me) will happily hand over the Coutts card (says so much more than cash ever can!) and you'll know you've had a bargain, whatever the price!

     It's not the sort of place for people who might ever need to ask for credit: that comes on cards; or tick, that goes in a box; or slate, that's the latest must-have for kitchen surfaces and  fire hearths.

Poor old Charlie. Come back all is forgiven...well almost!
  

Poppy-dom

What does it mean to wear the poppy?

This morning I stood in silence in the blustery rain by the city's gleaming new war memorial. I do not usually attend such events but felt something of a compulsion today despite the cold, the wind and  the rain. Perhaps it's because there has been quite a hooha locally over the memorial. The old Memorials Gardens had become a haven frequented mainly by winos and skateboarders, and there had been much muttering about the disgrace it cast upon a  fine city, but perhaps I was also influenced at some level by the regular stream of images on the TV of the young servicemen and women caught in a permanent frozen, uniformed smile who return home in solemn cortege processions. 

Old journo's habit dying hard, I edged up to the Council Leader and asked why, at such a time, he thought it right to spend public money on such an edifice.
     "Because we should never forget the terirble cost of war," he said, and I find it hard to believe that anybody could disagree with such a sentiment. It was the closest
I got to any sense of uplift. The overwhelming tone of the event was one of quiet, respectful sadness. 
    
I was one of several hundred residents, ex and current servicemen, city officials and at least one clergymen present. Just in front of me was an elderly lady wearing a hat the shape and colour of a Flanders poppy, a bright, almost cheerful display on a sombre occasion. The plaintive falling notes of The Last Post were the only sounds for a while as collectively and individually we remembered.

I confess my feelings over the poppy have changed over the years. As youngsters we were given pennies to buy them at school and wore them happily, thoughtlessly, until the stalks broke or they dropped out in a game of football or fell apart during an inappropriate playground battle. But back then I was promiscuous in my badge wearing, St Patrick's  shamrocks, birthday numbers, good causes and comic book freebies were all equally likely to adorn  my grey school jumper in those bygone monochrome days. Any splash of colour seemed like a good idea.

As a young man of determinedly anti-militarist feeling (the news and pictures fromVietnam were seldom edifying and made a big impression), I spurned the poppy for some years. Finally, belatedly, I came to realise that the poppy was not , as some might wish, a glorification of war, but a tribute to the fallen and a means of supporting the injured and relatives left bereaved. It was about looking after the living and respecting the dead,  not praising the glory of battle. I like to think that change came over me before my young brother-in-law was sunk in the Falklands and pulled alive from the Arctic water, on a day when several of his shipmates were less  fortunate. He overcame his ordeal and years later marched through London with hundreds of thousands of others to tell his government not to go war in Iraq in his name. If I can't mark the exact year of my conversion to adult poppy-dom, I do know  I have been a loyal wearer ever since. 

My brother,a former councillor, had an interesting take on the issue. He wore both the red poppy in respect of the dead and support of needy veterans, but he also wore on his other lapel, the less well-known white poppy of the Peace Pledge Union which works to promote peace and defuse international conflicts. That seemed to me a perfectly decent and principled approach but it did not stop him being criticised and accused of disrespect for wearing both to a Remembrance Day service in a small town full of small minds.
 
Curiously I was unable to buy a poppy at any of the four shops where I stopped enroute this morning. Nor was there a poppy seller anywhere within the vicinity of the open air service. Usually thepaper blooms are abundant and readily available at this season. Why such reticence this year? Perhaps media brouhaha has made people uncomfortable : we've had stories about TV personalities jumping the gun or competing with ever more elaborate specimen: too soon, too large too me-me-me. All such talk seems trivial. Those in the public eye would do well to take the example of the quietly respectful rememberers at thousands of  Remembrance Day observances across the  country who understand  it is not about the wearer but those for whom the flower is worn.

This makes it the first time for many years I have not worn a poppy, but I have made my donation and I feel I have paid my small tribute to  those who have fallen defending freedoms which should never be taken lightly or for granted. I will look for one a little earlier next year.