Last night, the London Street Grocery closed its doors for the last time.
The shop – a staple of life in the barony for the last 53 years – is now shuttered and empty.
Business has dried up in the months since Covid struck, with many people staying at home and ordering deliveries to their doors. The prolonged suspension of Broughton’s restaurant trade (which the firm supplied with excellent fruit and veg) and the absence of Drummond pupils cannot have helped either.
George Street was quiet yesterday afternoon. Eerily quiet, even for a Sunday.
There was only the occasional car. Otherwise the city-centre soundscape consisted mostly of crows rattling from rooftops, the occasional chimes of St Andrew’s and St George’s, and other people’s conversations clearly audible across four empty traffic lanes and a central reservation.
You may be experiencing a chronological meltdown.
Your dreary minutes may seem to last for hours. Dull hours for days. Each week may be indistinguishable from any other, each in its own repeat eternity.
How shall we navigate such fog? No normal chronometer will serve, not one designed to measure intervals between events. We need something new, an anti-clock, something particularly fit for nothingness and accurate to within a fraction of an absence.
Cometh the hour, cometh the shop.
When Spurtle interviewed Tom Hodges earlier this week, the irrepressible fizz in the Typewronger Books bottle was anxiously preparing for a special delivery … 1,400 books all arriving at once and requiring careful checking before removal by a customer the next day.
The client on this occasion was a film company requiring Tom’s quirky curation to dress a set. But compiling collections small and large like this is nothing new for this 34-year-old bookseller, who is long accustomed to providing personalised consultations and bespoke gift boxes for curious readers.
Edinburgh Dog & Cat Home will permanently shut its recently opened Stockbridge charity shop at 13a Raeburn Place in the wake of Covid-19.
The Seafield-based local welfare charity – established in 1883 to rescue, reunite and rehome lost, stray and abandoned dogs and cats across Edinburgh and the Lothians – has been unable to raise money as usual during Lockdown.
The Post Office plans to privatise its service at 40 Frederick Street on 15 April with the immediate loss of nine jobs.