21st Century Dodos: A Collection of Endangered Objects (and Other Stuff) (15 page)

It got more complicated when it came to cassettes or classical CDs, which were placed in order of price and catalogue number.

Of course, any system like this relies on librarian-like discipline when it comes to the storage and filing of items. But these were shops managed and staffed by 20-something rock music fans. And teenage Saturday staff.

Mistakes did happen.

When you couldn’t find a particular item among the sea of cardboard, you would call upon one of your colleagues to help out. Some of these people had been working there for a while and knew their way around the musical alphabet, and often knew the classic
misfiling – bands might have been misread as artist names, so Rolling Stones had ended up under S – but if that failed, then you had no option but to call out Dave from the stockroom.

Dave was the bloke in charge of re-ordering the stock, and the man who wrote out all of the masterbags. These were his babies. He knew where they were. He didn’t, however, much like the idea of coming out onto the shop floor, so you called on him at your own risk. If you timed it for just after his 11am coffee then you were probably OK.

Meanwhile, as all of this was going on, a huge queue was developing, with people eager to buy Adamski’s
Killer
on 12” single, or keen to return a defective copy of
Woodface
by Crowded House (‘I tried rewinding it with a pencil, but it wouldn’t work’).

We now live in a time of security tags, and record stores happily leave the stock intact when it goes onto the shop floor. This reduces the time taken at the till, which would be fine if it wasn’t then used to try to get you to join the loyalty card scheme, or to buy a copy of the new Justin Bieber CD for only £3.99, seeing as you have already spent £20 (‘I’d rather have it inserted anally, thank you’).

But that’s progress for you.

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Half-day Closing

If you wanted to buy a loaf of bread after 1pm on a Wednesday where I grew up, you were buggered. The same would have been the case throughout the country. The day might differ from place to place, but everywhere had its half-day closing. Pretty much every shop on the high street would be closed, with the exception of the post office. It would be proper tumbleweed territory come five past one.

The reason for bringing down the shutters at lunchtime one day a week was pretty simple: shopkeepers worked Monday to Saturday with only Sunday off. At least, that was the case until pressure mounted, and legislation was brought in to give workers an additional half-day’s holiday each week. Some individual town and village councils had introduced the rule in the late 19th century, but it wasn’t until the Shops Act in 1911 that it became enshrined in law.

Wednesday was usually the day set aside for early closing because it was conveniently located slap bang in the middle of the week. But this wasn’t the same everywhere, with Thursdays and Mondays often put to the same purpose. This could lead to great confusion when people were visiting from one town to another.

Looking back now in our time of 24-hour shopping and the changes in Sunday trading laws, this whole half-day closing malarkey seems awfully quaint and Olde English, but it was fairly common right up until the mid-1980s. It created a haven of peace and quiet in the centre of every town in the country, and there was a lot to be said for that.

Nowadays you won’t find any town, or even village, which observes half-day closing traditions, but you can still come across the odd shop here and there, often owned by elderly proprietors,
who insist on closing at midday on a Wednesday. And long may they do so.

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Record Tokens

If you are aged 40 or over, then there is a strong chance that somewhere in your house – at the bottom of the junk drawer, in an old shoebox under the bed, tucked away in the attic – there can still be found a record token.

An unused, out-of-date, and now completely worthless record token.

The principle was simple. Anyone could buy a record token from any music store and send it, using the free gift card it came with, to anyone else in the country. That person could then redeem the voucher in their own local record shop.

Rather neat.

The beauty of this system was that it enabled wizened old grannies with smelly hallways to give their unappreciative grandsons a birthday gift that was actually of some use. Rather than a pair of socks. Or a Ladybird book about reservoirs.

The scheme was administered by EMI and supported by all record shops, from the smallest specialist independent, to the big chains like WH Smith, HMV, and Boots (hands up if you remember Boots selling records). It spread the sales around. The token may have been purchased in Smiths in Sheffield, but was spent in Fives in Rayleigh. Or vice versa. For many people, their first ever record purchase was facilitated by a £3 record token. Or £5. Or £10. Depending what decade you grew up in.

The tokens themselves were small oblong pieces of card, in different colours for each denomination. The bottom portion was licked like a stamp by the sales assistant and stuck into a greetings card – you often had a choice of cards, all shite – when you bought them. When they were redeemed at the other end, the tokens were ripped across a perforation and popped into the till.

The system worked perfectly well for decades, until WH Smith introduced its own tokens. Other retailers followed suit and, over time, only the independents sold the EMI ones. The writing was on the wall, and they had vanished by the end of the 20th century.

Apart from the £5 token lying at the bottom of your wardrobe, of course.

If you added up all these lost, misplaced, ignored, and unused tokens, I reckon you’d have enough money to fill the current finance deficit. Just a guess, but try to prove me wrong.

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AT SCHOOL

Where we learnt, got into trouble, and grazed our knees …

Blackboards

Have you been into a school recently?

Where have all the blackboards gone?

Seriously, it is all whiteboards and computer projector screens and marker pens nowadays. No blackboards. No chalk. All very modern.

I can remember two types of blackboard from my school days. One, the most common, was the fixed blackboard at the end of the classroom, next to the teacher’s desk. This was the focal point of all lessons. It was where the spelling list went up, where the sums were displayed, where whole passages were written for us to copy out. There was usually some sort of ledge or shelf that held the chalk and duster. It was like a massive black window.

And then there was the rolling blackboard, the slightly more portable version. Usually on wheels, it was more portrait than landscape, and had a reel of coated material stretched across it so that it could be rolled down as it was used, a bit like a revolving hand towel in a public toilet. It meant the teacher could move on to a fresh, blank area when he or she had used up the space in front of them, but also allowed for a big reveal. The name of a special project, or the answer to a puzzle that the kids had been working on, could be written up and then rolled round to the other side, ready to be pulled down on cue.

The rolling blackboard still had to be cleaned, but it did give you a bit of time with the duster between sessions. It also allowed the pupils to draw a penis or write ‘Mrs Jones is smelly’ while the teacher was out, roll the blackboard down, and then convulse in spasms of anticipation as they waited for it to come round again. Along with the inevitable detention.

Of course, blackboards were rarely actually black. They very quickly became grey, coated as they were with layers of chalk dust.
All the blackboard duster did was spread that dust around, really, although it was still a sought-after job for the kids in the class, teachers often handing out the task to the ‘person who is sitting most still and quiet’.

But the best job of all was when you were asked to clean the blackboard with a wet cloth. This opportunity only came round once a week or so, but was the chance to get the blackboard back to its original glory. All traces of chalk were gone and, for a few brief moments, it looked pristine, unblemished. It was a thing of beauty. And then the teacher would start writing on it again.

This, in itself, was quite an art form. Have you ever tried writing with a new piece of chalk on a blackboard? It is bloody difficult, and especially hard to have anything remotely resembling neat handwriting while doing so. I guess this is now a dying art, writing on a whiteboard with a felt-tip is much easier.

As the blackboard vanishes off into the past with a puff of chalk dust, so does the origin of the phrase ‘Like fingernails down a blackboard’. We all know what that means, and some of us will have goosebumps at the very thought, but do our children? And will our children’s children?

Another classic image lost in the march of progress.

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