It happens sometimes

In January I blipped this picture of a corner of Appleby, our local town. At the time, I made quite a bit of the butcher's shop, next door to the hotel. A long established family-owned shop supplying the local area with high quality meats.


This is the same shop today. No it hasn't closed down, been lost to the recession, gone the same way as other high street shops, etc. It is very simply that the family has given up. The old man is very ill and the son does not want to be a butcher any more. Sometimes this will happen to family businesses.

Fortunately, the shop has been bought by the only other butcher in the town and is currently undergoing a complete refit in order, so they say, to bring it into the 21st century. I suppose that might mean that there will be prices where there were none before, that the old piano on which all the orders were placed will go, that the shop window might be decorative and neatly laid out, perhaps with plastic parsley edging, that the wooden floors will be tiled.

Will it do just as well as the previous shop. Well who can say at this point! It was sad today though to see that the name above the window had gone.