Has the High Street had its day?

The High Street as we once knew it – a cluster of small specialist family- owned shops – has probably gone forever, except in the pages of those old Janet and John books. It’s a long time since the average mother got her shopping basket and walked to all the different local shops every day.

Now even the malls are changing.

Marks & Spencer says it will build no more clothes shops after 2016 as they concentrate on online shopping.

Tesco is apparently getting rid of land earmarked for more megastores.

So yes, the internet has changed everything. And yes, rates and taxes make costs prohibitive for many firms. Then there’s the recession, the problems of parking and transport now that most of us live further away from the shops. And so it goes on...

But how many shops do we need?

Even without the internet, maybe there’s a limit to the amount of stuff we want to buy.

The number and size of shops has exploded in the past 20 or 30 years.

Northallerton, for instance, used to have a small Co-op and a Fine Fare in the High Street. Now there’s a huge Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Asda, each of them many times the size of the old Fine Fare, which in any case is now a Marks & Spencer.

As well as all the supermarkets round the edges, Darlington now has all the shops in the Cornmill and more development planned. Every town seems to have its new mall and retail park.

So, to keep that lot in business, compared to 30 years ago, a lot more people must be buying a lot more stuff a lot more often.

But buying stuff costs money and most of us haven’t got as much as we used to have. Like squeezing a balloon, if one bit expands, another area must shrink. We can’t go on expanding shops for ever. Those that offer good value, choice, service or something a bit special will survive. The rest will struggle. There will be more empty shops, more charity shops, more boarded-up shops.

But guess what? There’ll still be plenty left. We’ll probably still be able to find everything we need. And maybe even everything we want.

What a mug to lose the coach and horses

SIXTY years this weekend since the Coronation and I’ve still got my Coronation mug. It lives on a shelf in the hall and is very useful for keeping curtain hooks in. I’ve got the five bob piece too. Both were presents from some benevolent institution.

Council? Sunday school? Dad’s work?

What I haven’t got, sadly, is the little model Coronation coach and horses. I can remember picking the paint off and discovering that beneath the glamorous gold, there was very utilitarian brown plastic.

A major disillusionment at the time. Those coaches and horses are apparently worth a mint now.

Amazing, really, that the mug has survived all those years and goodness knows how many house moves. That must be worth a bit too, I thought, and looked optimistically on eBay, 99p.

It might as well carry on holding the curtain hooks.

FOR me, the Coronation took place in shades of grey on a tiny TV set in a very crowded room. Only one of our neighbours had a TV set and the whole road had piled in to watch. I wasn’t impressed. I’d been there before to watch children’s TV and thought the coronation hadn’t much action at all – definitely a second best to Hopalong Cassidy.

The booze queues

HOSPITAL emergency departments are said to be nearing meltdown. Some people are blaming GPs for opting out of out of hours calls, others blame the new NHS 111 phone system, which varies between sort of working to absolute chaos.

No doubt they’ve all contributed a lot of extra patients.

On the other hand, about two million visits to A&E each year – more than ten per cent of all visits – are directly connected to too much booze.

If so many people didn’t drink themselves daft, get into drink-fuelled arguments or behind the wheels of cars, wander drunkenly off balconies or into traffic, they’d save themselves a lot of pain and the rest of us a lot of hassle.

Some accidents are accidents that no one could have predicted. Others you can see coming as soon as someone staggers away from a bar.

They’re an accident just waiting to happen.

And always in front of you in the queue at A&E.

GRANDPARENTS are doing even more childcare while parents work – a staggering £7.3bn worth a year.

Which could buy an awful lot of Werther’s Originals.

So what happens when everyone has to work until they’re 70 and by the time they finally finish work Granny and Granddad are too shattered to cope with toddlers all day?

Raising the pension age could have all sorts of unintended consequences, not all of them brilliant for the economy.

So if your parents have been on baby-sitting duty this half term, better buy them some chocs or some wine and make a fuss of them.

Unless you’ve got a spare £7.3bn.

Vive la duchesse...

IF there’s anything worse than speaking in public, it’s speaking in public in a foreign language – it’s right up there with the nightmare of walking down the street with no clothes on.

Especially when you know that the world, well the British and French bits, are recording every word and, if not exactly willing you to fail, will laugh themselves silly when you do.

So well done to the Duchess of Cornwall for going off to France on Eurostar and giving a speech in French as patron of the charity Emmaus. However much there might be a secret PR campaign going on to make us love her, she was up there on her own and that still took guts.

The calm after the cuppa

MANY congratulations to worshippers at the Bull Lane mosque in York.

When a rag taggle group of protestors from the English Defence League turned up outside the premises, members of the mosque didn’t attack or retaliate.

Instead they went out and offered the protestors tea and biscuits. Brilliant.

Situation all calmed down, they all had a long chat and even went off to play football together.

What a wonderfully British way of doing things. And amid the encircling gloom, a small reason to cheer.