Band of Slugs

Why Charity Shops Are Brilliant

Ok go! Well, I think charity shops are the bee’s norks because they sell a whole range of fascinating nonsense – with a level of service you’d expect from the Ritz. The old ladies that staff these smelly-old-dress emporiums are constantly on the lookout for someone to assist; resulting in the best place to get hold of a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle with a statutory 25 percent reduction in pieces.

Where else can you wander into a shop and ask for a tie, where a little antiquated madam slowly mounts 3 flights of stairs, rummages round a bit the loft, then returns, very slowly, with half a tonne of the most flee bitten ties ever to have dodged the bin collection – no I haven’t finished this sentence yet – and where she watches you sort through each tie for a good 20 minutes, only to make an earth-shattering 45p for her efforts once you’ve decided on the hilarious Snoopy tie?

Not only this, but the low-key, musty atmosphere of the charity shop means that the people who visit them feel right at home, and will strike up conversations immediately about anything. It’s basically a place where old people come to chat to each other whilst eyeing up the latest in 1987 knitwear.

And it’s not the corporate ones I like either – it’s the ones with the odd little names that have a grand total of ONE BRANCH. I’m thinking the Exeter Rabbit Rescue Association, or The Dunstable Senile Society. In these you HAVE NO IDEA what’s going to happen when you walk through their front door.

As more and more of our pubs shut each day, more and more charity shops spring up to replace them. The charity shop is clearly the new public house – fast becoming the mainstay of British society. In a country where everything is put into little boxes and given a label, it is refreshing to saunter into these chaotic jumbles of books and clothes – invariably staffed by Miss Somerset 1956 – and find a 2nd edition copy of the Thames Tidal Barrier 1974-82 for only 10p. Where else can you do this?