Quaint

It is no mystery that I keep this diary for me. It started out as a way to get me to write often, at some point every day, and to spur me onto the completion of my PhD. As of late, it has become a place where I record the everyday so that I don't forget about it. Today, however, I really would like to put up some pics that will delight regular readers from afar (especially the Yanks) who seem to operate under the delusional radar that suggests England is all pretty and quaint and vintage-looking and infested with Hugh Grant-esque characters (Hugh Grant circa 1995 that is).

Generally, I would scoff and snort at such preposterous, romanticised visions (even though I do exactly the same for the US); they only come from people who never had the pleasure to come across Tesco, Poundland, the ever-ghastly Primark or underage chavs pushing prams, reasons good enough to send everyone screaming for the Cheshire countryside for ever more. But today I feel all Crimbo-fuzzy and mellow and so I give you one little gem that looks right out of an English movie shot on a cardboard street at Universal Studios. Except this shop is real.






As are these other shops.