Northampton 8th December 2006

There are some lists I carry round in my head. I supplemented a couple of these in Northampton. The shorter one is my list of mis-hearings resulting from the difference in accents that I come across around the country. Hitherto it was a list of one, where I’d convinced myself that a bloke on a hopper bus in Bradford had claimed to be recovering from a chipolata bypass. In Northampton I was mooching around the busy market square. Walking past a butcher’s van I swear the butcher announced over his microphone a special offer of trays of tube-steak for a fiver. I’m not sure why these mis-hearings should be meat-based and vaguely Freudian. Maybe it’s too soon to conclusively identify a pattern.
Another of my lists is the more comprehensive one of rare or obscure charity shops I’ve spotted. Mostly these are shops representing charities I’ve not heard of before, but I’m prepared to also include shops for well-known charities that don’t normally have retails outlets, like, say, the Samaritans shop in Carlisle. You have to wonder how this particular category of shop comes into being. Did the Samaritans think, ‘Right, let’s not go mad. We’ll start out with one shop in Carlisle and see how it goes.’ Then when it didn’t work out perhaps they didn’t have the heart to tell the volunteers in the shop the bad news.
This list doesn’t just represent the idle wool-gathering of an aimless middle-aged loser, although obviously that’s a big part of it. It also has a practical use. As a general rule, the more obscure the charity shop, the cheaper the stock. Near my allotment there’s a Geranium Shop For the Blind, which despite its name is a charity shop and not a really specialised florists. They have a semi-permanent sale where all clothes are £1. They illustrate one of the other principles of charity shopping, namely the white hair to price ratio. The older the staff, the greater the savings to be had. If everyone behind the counter has locks like cotton wool you can reckon on knocking at least a pound off the expected price of any item.
In Northampton I added a shop called Debra to the list. I’ve since assured myself via the good offices of Google that Debra is actually a charity, and not just some chancer called Debra who fancied jumping aboard the charity retailing gravy train. This, along with outlets for Barnardo’s, the Red Cross and the Salvation Army, was sited on Gold Street. These clusters of shops never result in the sort of price war I always hope for. I suspect they operate some sort of cartel, the buggers.