September 9

The plan this afternoon is for Sian and Ellie to go to the stables to help groom the horses while I run some errands in town.  I will then pick them up and they will sit in the car while I go to my meditation session.  All good on paper, but then I find some things that I thought were going to take me ages to do, take about three seconds, leaving me about an hour to spare.

I decide to go and have a look at a shop that I haven't set foot in in years, the One-Stop Co-op.  We used to come here quite regularly as teenagers looking for clothes and there was also a tearoom upstairs where I once spent a number of hours drinking coffee with a suave Serbian instead of going to school (and I didn't get caught).

Not such a cool place to hang out now.  It is a fairly large shop, but most of it is not being used.  Most of the shelves are empty and a few rails of dirty clothes hang haphazardly about.  Some of them, I think, are second hand; either that, or they have been hanging in the window too long and have faded in the sun.  

What I find quite creepy is that all the signs are still there: 'Be A Winner Today.  Buy your State Lottery tickets on the first floor' and 'Relax and enjoy yourself on The Sun Deck'.  Other signs are for Cosmetics, Children's Wear and Jewellery, although none of the counters still exist.  In the far corner is a kaylite sign with a smiling fox on it - Foxy Lady.  This was where the teenage clothes could always be found, the pouting lips of the fox suggesting the clothes were hip and fashionable.  Now, this corner of the shop is completely empty.

Because I feel sorry for the five or six staff knocking about with nothing to do (the man at the door can't even get the hand sanitizer bottle to work properly), I feel compelled to buy a packet of biscuits from the small supermarket that has sprung up in the corner diagonally opposite to Foxy Lady.  One man rings up the purchase on the till, another lady writes in a dog-eared school exercise book: ' 1 x Lobels Chocolate Cream $37.00' and asks me to sign in the last column. My card is declined twice, but works on the third time.  However, the machine is out of paper so someone has to run upstairs for a new roll.  This takes about ten minutes, during which time the other staff apologise profusely for the delay.

Although the experience is quite sad, I have picked up ammunition for a story I have been thinking about.  When I leave my meditation group, I find Sian and Ellie have completely devoured the packet of biscuits so that was a good buy at least.