'Why is everything I like taken away?', he wailed hysterically.
Here's what started it.
I went into sandwich bore Pret A Manger on my way to work this morning, which is looking evermore like the industrial zone in The Crystal Maze - time for a revamp I think - only to find they've stopped doing their delicious lemon and orange muffins. Not for everyday ingestion, these treats were iced, and the muffin mix contained bits of orange and lemon rind and poppy seeds. Delicious. And now consigned to the things F-C liked but what have been cruelly snatched away file, here are some others that have gone from my life but are not forgotten.
Baxter's Chicken & Almond Soup
A creamy, thick old fashioned concoction that wouldn't have been out of place on the Elizabethan dinner table. Obvioulsy didn't chime with the hoi polloi so discontinued. I assume their Thai spiced pollock curry is doing great business.
Underwoods
A chain of London-only chemist shops that were absolutely everywhere when I first moved here in the late Eighties. With its distinctive lime green name written at a an angle sign it had always been slightly exotic to me because they didn't have one in Winchester and now I actually got to shop there. Recently I discovered my sister-in-law worked in one in 1980. She wore a jumpsuit and went to discos with Vitus Gerulitis. But then the whole chain was taken over and became Boots Health and Beauty. How disappointing.
Smith's Savoury Vinegar Crisps
No one seems to remember these but me. They were the hit of the crisp world circa 1971, when crisps were 2 1/2p from the tuck shop. At the same time I recall Hula Hoops launching, and the fact that you could put them on each finger and eat them off saw fickle snackbuyers abandon the non-novelty crisp for something the considered to be much more fun, despite this johnny come lately tasting of salty chipboard. I'm sure it was this that did for the savoury vinegar crisp. They were amazing and not seen in nearly 40 years. I still don't care for Hula Hoops.
Individual John Lewis shops
Peter Jones aside, all John Lewises are now called John Lewis. While this sums up the practical, no fuss-no mess ethos of the store, it's a bit boring. Where I grew up in Southampton, we had Tyrell & Green a branch of the JLP. In Reading they had Heelas in Liverpool it was John Henry Lee. In Holloway Road where Waitrose stands now was a small store called Hope Brothers or Jones Brothers or something. In Cambridge it was Robert Sayle, in Southsea there was Knight & Lee. Now it's all one chain. No individuality.
That's what I miss, along with the Five Centres bar of course. So without getting all Spangles and spacehoppers about it, what do you miss?
