Shopping File
An occasional series about shoppers
in Leith.
A woman came into the shop today. "Do you
have any 80 shilling, son?" she asked. "Yes - sure - let me help you."
There were a couple of brands.
"It's McEwan's he likes," she went on. "McEwans 80 shilling."
"I'm afraid it's one pound
68," I said to her. "But there's Caledonian at one pound 48."
"No - I'll get him the
McEwans." She stood for a moment, looking at the price. "I'll take three
bottles. It's our Wedding Anniversary tonight."
"Oh that's lovely - how
many years?"
"Thirty six!" she
beamed, pleased, but not proud or showing off. She also had four cans of something
else - I forget what now, and as I was bagging up her drinks I asked if they were going
out to dinner. "No - I think we'll just have a quiet night in," she said -
softly but not sadly.
And I loved her, and I just
wanted to give her a bottle of our finest champers, and I wanted her and her husband to
live so very long and happily together. Maybe I'll see her again some day.
Wedding anniversaries
will always be significant, as it was for my parent's fiftieth anniversary that my family
was last united.
I felt so sad for them. All
those years, and just my sister, myself and a smattering of neighbours and acquaintances.
How eagerly they must have dreamed, in those frantic post war months, of a brave new
better world, and I steal the words deliberately.
How precious each squalling new bundle of life,
like myself, who would fill the country with a bright and strife-free future. And so they
made a welfare state, that no -one would go without, and they built loads of schools, cos
there were so many of us. And they built hospitals that you got treated in without paying.
And it was the envy of the world.
But somewhere it all went wrong. Horribly.
As global communication increased, then
neighbourhood broke down. As ethnic migrations stormed across continents, then identity
was challenged. And as mobility of labour became the norm, then extended families
dispersed, leaving the "nuclear family" and the even more dysfunctional
"one-parent family." What a cruel and ironic misnomer!
Universal free education has its drawbacks too.
How do you tell a bright 12 year old that speaking two languages, doing algebra and
learning the violin might just alienate him slightly from his old man, for whom fiddle is
something that gets you off work for a bit?
When my parents married, they would reasonably expect
that the world would remain substantially the same as it was then, just hopefully a bit
more affluent. They would imagine that their own children would marry and settle down
within, perhaps, 5 miles maximum.
How starkly their wedding anniversary brought home
the reality. One child married and five thousand miles away, and one distant just a few
hundred, but with not the slightest inclination to marry - ever, ever, ever.
Where now your universal child benefit, your
family allowance, your cod-liver oil and your national dried milk? What great new society
do we represent, myself deep in the kitchen period, and my sister in the bowels of Europe?
So I couldn't propose the toast to my parents at
their anniversary. I couldn't stand up and speak the words that sons are expected to at
these things. Me, the practised orator of glittering insincerity, who can, with the arch
of an eyebrow, hold 500 in thrall, could not say those few words that night. Because
I knew the disappointment, and I knew how tragically their hopes and dreams had been
dashed.
And then a few weeks later, at her home in England, my
mother suddenly died. On my birthday, her real anniversary. And on New Year's Eve, her
favourite night.
Her son was in Scotland, and her daughter in
Spain.
