Recuerdos de un adolescente.

Social media has a lot of bad stuff, but finding old pictures of close to where I grew up has been a bonus. I worked at this Woolly’s as a Saturday job while still at school, earning £1 less a 3p “stamp”. It was enough to splurge on a new pair of shoes at a nearby shop, or 3 vinyl singles. Riches beyond compare. I worked on the biscuit counter, weighing them into brown paper bags for customers. There was a “damaged” box where all the broken ones went, which could be sold at a discount (just a few “coppers”). Old ladies would come in for a quarter pound of broken biscuits “for the dog”, and I’d make sure to include a lot of good ones. The counter also had huge slab cake which had to be cut to the size the customer wanted, and for some reason I always got it spot on. The supervisor disapproved, saying you should always cut it a bit over as they had to pay more. The other product on the counter was loose leaf tea in big boxes, ready for weighing into paper bags to be decanted into a “caddy” once home. No plastic waste back then, as all customers carried baskets or shopping bags, or wheeled suitcase-style shopping trollies for a big shop or a frail shopper. The till was a huge metal job as in “Open all hours” where you had to add up all the items in your head first then enter the total by pressing down on stiff metal keys simultaneously for pounds, shillings and pence (and halfpennies!). The heavy drawer would shoot out and smack you in the stomach unless you were quick enough to step back in time. All this came back plain as day by just seeing this picture, yet I struggle to remember what happened yesterday