The Roslin ScotMid.

One of the elder statesmen of the camera club is an advocate of recording local life and, to that effect, gave a short illustrated talk on the subject illustrated by pictures from his youth. It is a philosophy that I like to follow, so here is our village Co-op – even though it does go by another name.
 
One of our neighbours was due to come home from hospital this evening having suffered from some sort of heart problem earlier in the week, so I popped out to get her a bottle of milk at dusk (we’d stolen hers while she was away so it  seemed only right) and then went on to check that her cat was still o.k. This store has had somewhat mixed fortunes over the years. When we first lived here, we had to be pretty desperate to make use of it; it carried little useful (to us) stock and kept traditional hours, that is, if you worked office hours, you would only find it open on Saturdays. Then a shop owner in Penicuik expanded his business, that is he moved over the road and had a much larger premises built. At much the same time, he bought our co-op, expanded and modernised it while increasing the opening hours and the range of stock. That was late 1994, I can date it fairly precisely, because The Old Lady paid for me to restore my trike as a significant birthday present, the machine had been languishing in the garage for many years. I went out on it for the first time on the day that the Penicuik shop opened and I stopped to see what it was like. While I was inside, the local press took a publicity photograph of the shop which included my trike parked by the entrance. After about five years, the shop owner cashed in his pension plan by selling the two shops, the big one became a successful Tesco store, the other reverted to the Co-op and has not been the same since.
Such is progress.

I've just posted yesterday's, "Blasted Tree."