Never Going Back Again

The weather put a - literal - dampener on yesterday’s “date day” excursion. We decided to go to Coniston in the hope the rain might have eased by the time we got there. It hadn’t. After a quick walk around the village in the drizzle, we abandoned it as a bad job and retired to the cafe for a cup of tea and a toasted tea cake. The building in the picture is the old Barclays Bank in Coniston where I worked for a few years. I’d always known it was Martins Bank before it was Barclays, but I’d never known it started out as a Bank of Liverpool outlet. That bank became the Bank of Liverpool and Martins after a merger, subsequently renamed Martins Bank and then Barclays when they took over Martins at the end of 1969.
I worked for Barclays for 22 years before accepting voluntary redundancy in 2000. I bought a cosmetic vehicle repairs company but when work was slack in the winter, I took up an offer to come back and work for Barclays as a cashier on an “on call” basis to provide a bit of regular income.Three days a week at Coniston suited me fine as I could still do the vehicle work as well. To cut a long story short, I subsequently packed in the car repairs and returned to Barclays on a permanent contract, as the clerk in charge at Coniston, in 2004. A lovely place to work, sited at the side of a river with views of Coniston Old Man out of the window. I spent a few happy years there before moving on to become Branch Manager at Ambleside. That proved to be a mistake and I left the bank (again!) in 2010. When I worked there, Barclays had dozens of outlets in South Lakeland. There are now only two still open - Kendal and Barrow. And even if they begged on bended knee (highly unlikely!) I would never go back to work there.
I understand that the person who bought the building has gutted it completely, paying a small fortune to extract the old safe. But the rumour is that there might be a planning issue, which could explain the building’s somewhat neglected air. If those issues could be resolved, I reckon it would make a lovely holiday home. But it won’t be cheap to finish the conversion.