Desk

When I was a small boy, growing up in New Malden in the early 1970s, supermarkets didn't have electric conveyor belts by the tills: you had to slide your purchases towards the cashier. The tills were mechanical, too, and made lots of interesting clunking and ringing noises.

However, we all know technology doesn't stand still and Marks & Spencer were at the forefront of checkout tech. Their tills had a sliding, three-sided box with an erect wooden handle. You put your goods in the box as the person in front of you was being served and then, when it was your turn, the cashier used the handle to pull all your shopping forward.

Jump forward twenty years and all the supermarkets - and there are now so many - have electric conveyor belts and digital tills. My first wife and I had just moved to Cumbria and, one (slow) weekend, we decided to take a drive along the southern coast to Barrow and then head up the west coast. As we drove north, my first realisation that we were heading into the twilight zone came when we drove past an Esso garage; I hadn't seen an Esso sign like that for years! And then, when we popped into M&S for lunch, I noticed with a sharp chrono-shock that they had the old wooden boxes at the tills. Suddenly, disorientingly, I was connected back to six year old me.

I had a similar experience, today, when I encountered this old desk. It was just like the ones we had at school, except our chairs weren't attached to the desk. But the inkwell - already redundant by the time I reached secondary school - and the groove at the top for one's pen or pencil were very familiar: so many hours spent with that as my immediate landscape.

It made me remember Nicholas Boot who had invented a desktop cricket game in which he wrote the numbers one to six around the sides of his pencil and he would roll it down the desk to see what each batsman scored. (Writing this now, I realise there must have been far more to it than that.) The quiet clatter of his pencil was the sole accompaniment to those long, hot, summer lessons.