Yet another slice of happiness has vanished for ever
IN AN age of poncy, expensive sourdough bread as dense as a black hole, and of steam-baked supermarket loaves, it is good and rare to find proper bread, baked as it should be. Few delicacies in the world beat the taste of new white bread spread with salted butter. Where I live, in an ancient city where progress is treated with proper suspicion, we have for many years still been able to do this.
We also still have the remnants of a real covered market, with actual butchers and greengrocers. But those of us who shop there fear it cannot last much longer, because others cannot be bothered to do so. It is hard to see how the shopkeepers can make it pay much longer. Anyway, this week, the baker’s shop just shut. Bang. The notice taped to the metal shutters said flatly ‘Closed Down’.
There had been no warning that I had seen, though I had feared for the place ever since some mad edict closed the airy, spacious covered market, with its high roofs and broad avenues, on the pretext of Covid. At the same time dozens of airless supermarkets stayed open. A grim silence fell. Even when it eventually struggled back to life, a customer was an event.
I rang up the bakery, based in a nearby town, and am glad to say they still survive. But that particular shop, which had flourished since 1955, is gone for ever. The spokesman bristled when I suggested that the Covid panic had done for it, but I really can’t see how it was not involved. A lot of shopping is habit, and if you break that habit you often never return to it. Certainly other shops in the town have had a very hard time indeed. I don’t think we have found out yet just how many other shutters will clatter down for good by the time it’s over, and the bills for more than a year of furlough and mad borrowing finally come in.
It’s another piece of real life gone. It’s replaced by clones, imitations of genuine freshness, lit and displayed to look good in the supermarket aisle or on TV, but actually a bland disappointment. Never again on a dark, chilly winter’s afternoon will I be able to take a child to that counter, in that handsome, busy, friendly market, and buy the sort of bread and buns and cakes I used to eat in my childhood.
Not much, really, is it? An event about as small as any you could find. So why do I feel such a huge sense of irrecoverable loss?