The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
2:23pm on Monday, 14th February, 2005:
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We have a new shop in West Bergholt, or rather we have a new version of an old shop. Right in the centre of the village, where Chapel Road meets New Church Road (it's the road leading to the new church, not the new road leading to the church), is the site of what was for many decades "Elmer's". A couple of years ago, the Elmer family sold up to the Co-Op, which demolished the adjacent house and made it into a car park. Last year, they started building a new shop on this car park, and last week they finished. Presumably, the old shop will now be demolished to make way for a new car park.
The new shop opened this morning, so I went along. It has pretty much the same layout as the old shop, but with a greater selection of products. In particular, it has Cadbury's Creme Eggs; I neither know nor care about anything else it might sell.
The new shop incorporates a post office. The old post office (a pokey little place in a badly-built extension to an ordinary house) has closed down. This became inevitable after the people who bought it 6 or 7 years ago decided not to continue with its newspaper-delivery sideline. The official story was that they were committed Christians and didn't believe in working on Sundays, but I note they weren't committed enough not to sell lottery tickets. Lottery tickets, of course, don't involve getting up at 5am.
I hope demolition of the old building and construction of the car park doesn't take months — the vehicles that accumulated while the new building was being constructed made driving along Chapel Road something of a trial (and as for driving out of New Church Road, which has the school on it as well as the new church, that was purgatory). With so many small village shops and post offices closing, it's good that the Co-Op has decided to invest in West Bergholt rather than abandon it.
If only they sold petrol...
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Copyright © 2005 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).