This is a subscriber-only article
The corner shop in our village sadly closed last year.
As quietly and unassumingly as it had opened every day for the past 37 years, it was suddenly shut.
No farewell, no fanfare, no fuss.
Just a closed red door where an open red door had always been.
This keeper of secrets, listener of woes, and sticking plaster of relationships with its dusty boxes of emergency chocolates and brightly bunched flowers was now no more.
Rite of passage
And that rite of passage, that had served generations of local children as they walked to the shop straight-backed with importance, coins tightly clutched in sweaty hands, and ears ringing with admonishments to “mind the road, hurry home and bring back the change” was now lost.
The wooden-framed notice board outside the door, advertising a long- forgotten tour of The Matchmaker, kept a watchful eye over an empty coal bunker that had kept the village warm for decades with bags of singles, briquettes and blocks.
Blocks of wood for the cold nights, newspaper wrapped blocks of ice cream for the warm nights and chat for all those other nights in-between.
The well stocked shelves were a living time capsule where generations of changing tastes collided.
TK Lemonade and Tayto for the Saturday night big movie, Batchelors baked beans for the Friday evening fry and luminescent tinned green peas for Tuesday night chops.
Glass bottles of Chef tomato ketchup sat side by side with the more adventurous powdered packets of McDonnells curry sauce as freshly laid eggs covered in the down of local chickens snuggled into neighbouring jars of homemade jam.
Club milk and Kimberley biscuits for the cup of tea (Barry’s of course) and Flahavan’s oats for the breakfast, to be taken with tiny tins of Squeeze concentrated juice, promisingly packed full of juicy oranges.
Sweets
But above all, the shop was an Aladdin’s cave of impressively large jars of sweets and jellies of every description.
Yellow bellied snakes, sour strawberries, fried eggs and liquorice laces of all colours fought for attention with the cola cubes, blackjacks and fruit salads and of course those bright yellow sherbet fountains.
But for all the juicy jellies, and succulent sweets and sour sherbets, my favourite was the never-ending gobstopper. It was cheek achingly good as it slowly shrunk to fit your mouth but, despite its well- advertised longevity and super-staining colour-changing powers, like the corner shop, it couldn’t last forever either.
About Kate: More often heard on RTÉ Radio One getting “A Word in Edgeways”, Kate is excited to be sharing her thoughts with readers of Irish Country Living. Editor of the Muskerry News and Kenmare News, Kate loves dogs, gardening and writing, in no particular order.
SHARING OPTIONS: