community by katharine eastman

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one of those quiet simple repetitive gentle things - it's like a ticking clock (metaphorically, not literally) in that if it's going on in your background and you're not noticing it, then it's good - but if it's right in your foreground and it's the only thing you're noticing, then you probably really do not want to notice it, and it's not good at all. I quite like it, but then I'm easily distracted
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Yes I like photos of horse-troughs - this one's just outside Houghton, on the walk to Broughton and beyond, which I did yesterday afternoon. It's all familiar ground and so therefore didn't make me very high or anything. It just did the job. In Broughton I went to the "village shop" to buy diet Pepsi and gunk. It's not a proper village shop - it's one of those community project things that's housed in the village hall and that sells about 8 different things and the locals use it to buy something they don't need and they only want to keep it going to keep up the village's property prices - "oh yes, the village has a shop, you can buy newspapers and groceries blah blah and diet Pepsi" .....(diet Coke alas - to be accurate).

I stood at the front of the two-person queue while the two women behind the counter flaffed around over some error on the till and it took them ages and there was no news on when normal service would be resumed, and when it was resumed it was very poor - a sullen silent grabbing of my wotsits and a silent sullen announcement of the cost and a shoving-forth of the card reader, and I am being oversensitive here - but my problem is that I am now more used to supermarkets and towns and cities and so I've forgotten how rude most "village shops" are/were.

Supermarkets etc have to fight for survival and so they put their nicest most engaging people on the tills etc, and the staff who have no interpersonal skills are made managers or something overpromoted and safely out of the way.

As someone who has worked in a village shop I know what an odd bunch of fellow-oddballs and drunks and depressives you work for and alongside and how they/we are tolerated when there is no nearby choice. Walking through Broughton you can see at least a couple of homes which were once shops - one is actually called "the village shop" or "the shop on the corner" or something, and the other one still has part of the old awning over the giveaway too-large too-low front windows.

But they've all been swept away as we've all been swept into the supermarkets and as we expect passably courteous interaction with the workers - we expect and want them all to be the same, and it stings us, as it stung me yesterday, when someone doesn't smilingly conform - when someone is actually a real human being - and it's so upsetting whenever I do bump up against a rude shop worker that I prefer the charm of the self-service tills - I will actually avoid e.g. Aldi, which in my tiny experience doesn't seem to have any self-service tills in any of their nearby stores, and I am sad that I was born too late to experience the wild old world in all its eccentricity, and I am sad that I was born too early to experience the safe tamed uniform never-offending world that I am helping to urge into existence.
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(recorded this lunchtime, photo yesterday, Houghton)
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