The Shop that Closed

There was a shop at the end of my street called Hadley's. It had been there longer than I had. Mr Hadley ran it. His father had run it before him. It sold small useful things. Batteries. Screwdrivers. The kind of bread that is not pretending to be anything else.

Last winter, it closed. A handwritten sign went up in the window. Then the sign came down, and the windows were covered with paper, and for months nothing happened. Eventually something else opened. A place called Glow that sells drinks the colour of swimming pools.

I thought about Hadley's more than I expected to. The shop was not important. Mr Hadley was friendly but we were not friends. I could buy batteries somewhere else. None of it mattered, really.

Except that, thinking about it in bed one night, I started counting the things on my street that had gone, and I could not think of many things that had come. The library is open three days a week instead of six. The post office is gone. The bank is now a Thai restaurant. The Thai restaurant before the current one was also a restaurant, and closed. The pub is still a pub, but the people in it are not the people I grew up seeing in it.

None of this is a tragedy. Streets have always changed. I am old enough to remember my parents saying the same thing about their streets.

But something happens when you add up small changes none of which matter. The total matters, even if none of the parts did. You look up one day and the place you live has become a different place. Not better, not worse. Different. And you realise you did not choose any of the changes. They happened while you were looking the other way, and now they are your life.

This book is about that feeling.

Not the small version — Hadley's closing. The big version. The one where you look up and realise your country is not quite the country you grew up in. Where the people you know are not finding work the way their parents found it. Where the family down the road has half the children your family had. Where the teenagers on their phones are watching things you do not understand.

It is not one thing. It is many small things. None of them, on their own, is a crisis. All of them, together, is something.

I want to tell you what you will find, if you come along. You will find a quiet description of what seems to be happening, piece by piece. Some of it will be familiar. Some will be new. The value is not in any one piece. It is in seeing them next to each other.

You will find, near the end, a question that I think is larger than most people currently believe.

And you will find, at the very end, a few small specific things that have helped in other hard times. Not instructions. Not commandments. Things that, when I looked honestly, I could see had held. They may help you. They may not. You will know better than I do.

I am not an expert. I am a person who has been paying attention.

If you are ready, we walk.