Mr Jolly lives next door to a comprehensive range of premium cosmetics.

[hirez]

All the survivors of the secret department store wars of the 80s seem to be from House Fraser. I imagine that's actually a nom du guerre and their ancestral homeworld is Giedi Prime. You could tell that something odd was going on if you bothered to pay attention to the layout of the buildings, because nothing quite lined up the way you thought it should. You'd be looping up a central stairwell away from gentlemen's unmentionables and in search of mechanical Christmas decorations that played tunes on a tree filled with tiny anvils, when a right turn would end in a blank wall where a staircase should have been.

I never did find the mechanical decorations again. It was the eighties, so the level of compute and miniaturisation would have been impossible. It was obviously a mistake to leave it somewhere an Earth-native human could find it.

Mind, whenever I do go into Jolly's of Bath, I am disappointed not to be met by Peter Cook with apron and meat-cleaver and telling me to 'Fuck off out of it. Go on. Fuck off.'

That wasn't really what I was going to write about. Perhaps that post needs some more time to mature.

Comments

[quercus.livejournal.com]

I miss David Morgan's in Cardiff. It wasn't the Selfridges group, and it had an arcade with an Ian Allan bookshop in it.

Now both have gone.

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

As far as I'm concerned I still work "just down from the Army & Navy". Particularly as it was the original from whence all others of that ilk sprang forth.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

You know how old department stores were always assembled from a bunch of unsuitable adjacent buildings joined together into a single giant unit ?

I submit to you that they are in fact Transformers, combining into mega-shops in order to engage in a slow and secret battle of commerce.

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

Do they sell tonic water? *scratches chin thoughtfully*