So I made the fatal error this morning of cycling down to the shop before my mid-morning cup of coffee and, brain clearly not functioning as a result, arrived without any money at all to pay for the paper. At which point Papershop woman just smiled and gave me the paper anyway and said I could make it up tomorrow. Which isn’t really all that surprising, I suppose, given that I’ve been buying the paper from them four times a week for four years. But I ask you how long would you have had to have been buying the paper from a shop in London regularly before that would happen? Forty years? Four million?
Meanwhile, I shall be making sure not to attempt anything complicated unless my blood-coffee levels (to borrow a phrase from @scsmith4) are up to adequate levels.
Oh, and remind me to take an extra £1.20 into the shop tomorrow, would you? Might be embarrassing otherwise…
Isn’t life in the stiks marvellous? I’m sure we’ve all done similar and for those of us who are incomers (as we shall surely remain until at least the fifth-generation or when hell freezes over, whichever comes later) we still worry about having to rush back with the cash…
Well, perhaps not London where, according to a chap I met a couple weekends ago in Shrewsbury, they “only want your money”. I can’t speak to that, since I’ve never been there.
However, here in Vienna, I actually didn’t have enough money for a Saturday paper a while back, and the chap at the newspaper stand was actually going to GIVE it to me. I had never heard of such a thing. I mean, I had been giving him a slight tip on occasion up until that point, but I didn’t expect him to be acting as my bank manager.
I paid for it on the Monday.
I’ve subsequently made sure I have adequate cash on hand however, since I certainly don’t expect merchants to be extending me credit. Gets old quite quickly, not to mention embarrassing.
I was short of cash in our local post office recently and the gentleman behind the counter said he’d “Take it out of the cofffee money” and I could pay him back.
As with Bob I paid back quickly because it would be embarrassing otherwise.
Besides, it occurs to me that the Post Office is in institution that really does know where you live, especially as in this case the manager is also the letting agent for our apartment.
When things get that complicated, you can tell it’s a small village…
I bought a paper from our unsmiling newsagent in Hackney every day for three years and he never once gave so much as a hint that he recognised I’d ever been in his shop before…
Get yourself one of those gadgets that you put a £20 note in and it attaches to your bike keys, looks like an oversized thing you put the dogs name and address in on a dog collar.
No prizes for guessing what paper you read…..
I live in London and my papershop are happy to do just that … Clearly they didn’t get the memo.