Clapton Pond Blog

Clapton, Class & Classic FM

Breathe out, everyone. It looks as though Palm 2 has not only survived the arrival of Tesco Express, but thrived on it. Ultra-Darwinists (I'm not one) and ultra-believers in market forces as the answer to everything (ditto) will hail this as a triumph of adaptation and competition. I'll go along with that to the extent that Abdullah and his team have undoubtedly risen to the challenge the arrival of the supermarket monolith represented. But I'm more interested in the way they've done it. This seems to throw into relief the existence of certain trends that have long been predicted for this corner of the great metropolis, but never been conspciuously present.

Post Office Tension

This happened months ago, but I've been saving it up. You know the post office I mean. It's the main one for the district - these days, the only one. It's located at the back end of a long, narrow shop (gifts, cards, stationery) and brings to my mind the term "corridor of misery". When queueing there - there's always a queue - a kind of speculative bleakness envelops me. Seeing the staff at work behind those thick glass screens gets me wondering if the glass would stop a bullet. A brightly-sprightly robo-voice that calls people forward  - "Cashier number 3!" -  serves only to throw into sharper relief the tiredness of the rest of the scene.