Shopping like it used to be is back – and it’s as joyous as it ever was

Until about 1989 there was a characterful little bakery in the village of laxdale, just outside Stornoway on the isle of lewis. You would have thought Craggan’s eccentric. it looked, to the ignorant passer-by, just like an ordinary house.

it displayed no sign and made not the least effort to advertise. All it sold was bread and four kinds of biscuit, produced through the night in venerable Victorian ovens. Even more oddly, the loaves were sold not at fixed price but by weight, assessed before you on balance scales black with age and against counterpoised brass weights.

But it was glorious bread – crusty, aromatic Scots plain loaf. the salty oatcakes, the buttery shortbread and the rich Abernethy biscuits were pretty good too, but Craggan’s was most famous for what they called ‘Big Biscuits’ and everyone else called Craggans – a sort of crusty golden flatbread, stippled with little holes and our island’s riposte to focaccia.

Sadly, the enterprise is long gone and the very building has been long obliterated, admittedly eliminating a dangerous blind corner on a very busy road. But we still call it Craggan’s Corner and i still rather wistfully miss their biscuits.

Scots retail habits have greatly changed since my Sixties infancy, not least because most women now work full time and our diet is far more eclectic and cosmopolitan.

the tendency now is to do a Big Shop once a week, hauling home a boot-load of provisions from tesco, Morrison’s or wherever with the same weary satisfaction as our furthest forebears once dragged back a slain mammoth.

those leisurely mornings of Peter and Jane Go Shopping With Mummy – the courtly round of grocer and greengrocer, butcher and fishmonger and ironmonger; Mummy behatted and begloved – seem today as distant as Anthony Eden and the second post.

Yet, where little village stores survive, they are increasingly cherished instituselling tions. this week, one cheerful Borders concern – the Mainstreet trading Company, in St Boswells – was officially declared Britain’s Best Small Shop by the independent Retailers Confederation.

ADMITTEDLY there is rather more to the Mainstreet trading Company than an avuncular chap in brown overalls by a gleaming bacon slicer.

Run by Bill and Rosamund de la Hey, it is a combined bookshop, café, delicatessen and homeware store. it sells crunchy artisan bread, throws the odd pop-up dinner and hosts popular meet-the-author events which, over the past decade, have lured such celebrities as Clare Balding, Michael Palin, Val McDermid and Jeremy Paxman.

Cycling legend Sir Chris Hoy will be holding court on november 29. there’s even a children’s corner where your tot can listen to the audiobook of the day, and the deli offers oozing French cheeses, all manner of charcuterie and a range of wines, gins and craft ales you will struggle to spot in any supermarket.

it’s a far cry from the plain but friendly little village stores that used to dot the Hebrides, everything from paraffin by the jug and rope by the yard to packets of tea, tins of biscuits, rat poison and baler twine, and the latest issue of the Free Presbyterian Magazine – but just as cherished a social hub for its community, and sufficiently bold in concept to hold its own against the tug of supermarkets.

that so few such ‘Johnny a’ things’ shops survive today is less because they wanted for customers than because they were exceedingly demanding to run – long hours, six days a week, invariably beginning with an oh-gosh o’clock drive to Stornoway or Portree or the nearest metropolis for newspapers and perishables, and seldom making more than modest profit.

Yet they took a sturdy pride in themselves and their villages in them, and i still remember the stately calendar hanging in my grandmother’s kitchen, as majestic as if it had come from Harrod’s – ‘Angus Gillies, General Merchant, the Gate, Shawbost’.

And one highly respected Edinburgh citizen has, over the years, built up a small but gracious empire of distinctive corner shops that are today no less prized in the pleasant Auld Reekie districts they serve.

Franco Margiotta was only nine when his parents, he and five siblings arrived in the Scottish capital, in October 1957, from a tiny italian village in the Apennines. they had very little, but they worked hard, finally scraping together enough to open a sweet shop off the Royal Mile.

Soon they had three others, increasingly majoring in ice cream, and in the Seventies the family finally bought a shop in the Marchmont district and, by enterprise and guile, from Franco’s own 1989 breakout developed the distinctive and reassuring Margiotta brand.

Boldly, he broke with icecream production and focused on developing a high-end grocery enterprise.

TODAY, Edinburgh boasts seven bright, clean and beautifully laid-out Margiotta shops, for the most part cannily in districts with high student populations. the friendly staff are in branded black uniform. Classic FM plays serenely in each branch.

there are splendid displays of artisan baking, fresh fruit, wide-ranging delicatessen shelves, locally sourced organic meat and much specialist food and drink again beyond what you could find in a typical supermarket. You can grab exquisite coffee to go, freshly made sandwiches or salads for lunch and banter cheerfully with the assistants. Stepping into any Margiotta store is to taste local friendliness and gracious living.

‘the whole family has been actively involved,’ says Franco happily, on the company’s no less impressive website, ‘and you will most likely see myself, my wife, son and daughters around the shops.’

there is now a monthly market in the flagship store, on Dundas Street, and it also now boasts a hot food kitchen, manned by a young italian chef. ‘We would like to create an atmosphere where you come in for your regular topup shopping,’ Franco enthuses, ‘and then you spot something you’ve never seen before.

‘When you go to a farm shop or a visitor centre, they always have these nice little things that you might not necessarily buy, but it makes you feel good for having seen it. We want people walking out of our shops feeling a little bit better than when they came in…’

like all the wisest independent retailers, Margiotta and his dozens of employees know they are, essentially, in the happiness business. And, for those of us who cherish such local enterprise, the message is clear – use it or lose it.