memory a swingin' door

[freckles_and_doubt]

I woke up this morning with a very vivid memory of the department store in the town in which we lived when I was in lower junior school - I think I must have dreamed about it. It was one of those old-fashioned, faintly larney stores with umpteen floors with clothes and fabric and household goods and what have you, and a lift attendant, and also one of those weird old cash systems where receipts and money were put into little brass capsules and shot away through a complicated series of tubes by air pressure. (The same system I was, in fact, discussing with James only last weekend, in the context of the bizarre note-sending system in a velvet-lined Berlin nightclub frequented by Brian Eno and David Bowie. James was told about it by Brian Eno. Strange but true).

I remember the department store with pleasure, but in fact what I mostly remember were the tills, about which I obsessed as a child. They were those huge, chunky, old-fashioned ones with the numbers which popped up on cards, and the buttons were little metal cylinders with a concave end, ranked with different banks of colour, and they depressed with a satisfying click. I used to lust after those buttons to a quite unreasonable extent - I'd actually have vivid dreams in which I was almost, but not quite, allowed to press them. I have no idea why. Something about the tactile pleasure of that "click", I think. I suspect I was an odd child.

Dept. of Random YouTube: courtesy of sf writer Elizabeth Bear, a new bit of viral wossname, this time directed against Scientology. Spread the word! this is one viral campaign behind which I can, so to speak, get.

Watch on YouTube

Off now to consume vast and unnecessary quantities of food at the Hussar, by way of celebrating My First Paycheck. Possibly it's all worth it.

Comments

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

God, I'd forgotten about Barbours, they had a wonderful pneumatic system. Plus those old-fashioned lifts with the concertina doors. No, it wasn't Barbours I was remembering, it was a much smaller store in what at the time was Fort Victoria (now Masvingo). There's actually a reasonable facsimile of the cash register I remember here (http://www.fotosearch.com/clt003/ks2621/).

[nimnod.livejournal.com]

I recall, with some fondness, their tea-room... (Barbours, that is).

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Yes! In fact, I was going to make some such comment above, and then got side-tracked. It was slightly genteel, and had good food and a rather dark ambience. I remember it being a high treat to have tea there, mostly because it was expensive and we weren't well off.