A window on the world

After yet another hospital appointment where my eyes were put through a range of gymnastic procedures, I emerged with a prismatic coating on my right lens that is intended to go some way to correcting the double vision that has been my lot for several months this year. They have told me to persevere but I have my doubts. It is a temporary measure but if it shows promise the orthoptist can arrange a properly tailored prismatic lens (which sounds expensive).

Feeling flat about all the bad news from the retail sector today. They’ll have to start calling it the low street rather than the high street soon. These big names are a part of your personal history. I remember in 1981 when I was employed as a nursing assistant at the Maudsley Hospital in Camberwell, an Australian guy I was working with called Tony came in dressed in a really nice shirt. He was a bit of a hunk anyway, the sort of Aussie who you can imagine strutting along Bondi with a board under his arm and throwing Joey Trebianni style lines at women from behind a wide mouthed grin. But clothes maketh the man and he looked pretty damn hot. “I found this place called Top Shop in London” he said. “Really nice stuff. You should check it out”. I was buying discounted t shirts and jeans in an old converted cinema on Denmark Hill at the time and having no joy in my relationships with women, something that the typical proto-incell male ego attributed to the way I dressed. I mean, it couldn’t be my actual body or any personality defect, surely?

My mate Roger, a flamboyant and cheeky Irishman who has spent the last thirty five years playing trombone in the Jools Holland band, got there first, and that weekend appeared at a party in a Top Shop striped coloured jacket which he carried off with swagger. I had to have one, but it just didn’t work. In John Ruskin Street where I lived the local youth hurled empty coke cans at me and yelled that I looked like Joseph in a cut down version of the multicoloured dreamcoat. But I still loved the shop, and remember fondly the skin tight white trousers and blue plastic shoes with white trim that (again) failed me in the dating game, but at least meant I was a loser in contemporary dress (this not long after Jo Brand, who I worked with at the time, called me “Man at C&A”, such was my lack of sartorial snap).

Fast forward a few decades and I am sitting at the bottom of the escalator at Top Shop’s flagship store in Oxford Street. My teenage daughter is running wild on every level (literally) and I am physically and mentally exhausted. The turnover is startling; every minute hundreds of people were entering and exiting the store in a Dantesque vision of retail hell. It was like watching an infernal conveyor belt of stressed out consumers doomed to an eternity of shopping without ever dropping. The love affair was over. By now I was buying my trousers and shirts in Debenhams and internet shopping was something I had yet to discover.

I’m sorry where things have landed. Capitalism doesn’t really care and Top Shop is going the way of Thomas Cook, Woolworths, Allders, British Home Stores and the like. Tens of thousands of jobs on the line and a lot of memories. And Debenhams is on the rack too (no pun intended). Where will I buy my trousers now?

Someone needs to come up with a plan for the high street that realises that shopping isn’t just about shopping. It’s about connecting, about having coffee, about colourful window displays and bumping into friends, about sitting down and enjoying food, books and conversation, about fairy lights in winter and street performers in summer. We need to raise the quality of our shopping centres, get rid of the cars, and align the retail experience with the cultural and the environmental. We need to make shopping fun, sociable and much more artisanal - incentivise the unusual and the good. Local shopkeepers of the world unite, we have nothing to lose but our chains. 

One thing this year has taught us is that staying indoors has its limits. We are sociable animals, not economic ones. We go shopping for the same reason that we go to galleries, cinemas and football matches - to see the world move around us and take us away from our own obsessive thought processes. The reason people like “window shopping” is because they need a window on the world, even if they don’t have much to spend.