I have to confess that despite my hymn of praise to the dress buying experience the other day, I hate shopping and most particularly shopping malls. Poor Basingstoke really doesn't stand a chance.
It has to do with, like so much else in my life, Calcutta, and how the experience of shopping there formed my buying habits. To shop in Calcutta was to walk into an adventure. The New Market, a Victorian mall in fact, was laid out in such a way as to invite you to experience the world. Avenues of shoe shops, side alleys filled with flowers, curio shops that would have had Dickens frantically rewriting The Old Curiosity Shop.
To go with my mother as a small baba meant following her to Empire Stores where jealously guarded imported goods were produced like jewels for her inspection: tins of baked beans, canned smoked oysters and even Kool Aid were brandished and bought. Further on the meat market, best walked through with a fixed stare and holding one's breath. We went through and out the other side - the cook was sent to buy the meat. Just next door the fish market - again the smell was overwhelming but here we would stop and look for lobsters, bekti and hilsa. Huge prawns would be added to the growing pile of goods that Old Buddha balanced on his head.
I would always beg to go through the animal markets, birds, parrots and budgerigars, rabbiits, white and pied and monkeys - oh how I wanted a monkey. All it took however to make me quiet again was the repetition of how if bitten I would have to have ten injections - all in my stomach - to innoculate me against rabies. Even now, I hesitate to pat a strange dog such was the power of that particular moral tale.
All provision shopping done we would head into the main market with its lanes and alleys spiralling out from the centre where, at Christmas, the Chinese would sell paper chains and lanterns. A favourite stop was Chumbu Lama, a tiny shop owned by a Tibetan refugee - in a similar manner to Emipire Stores he would reach into the back of the shop and treasures would be brought out to be viewed. Exquisite bronze buddhas, ropes of turquoise and coral; the tresaures of a refugee race forced to sell their heritage to live in a strange land. Every piece had a story and most were heart breaking. I don't remember Mum buying much - simply listening and sometimes returning with Desmond or letting Chogyal know that soemthing rare was in the bazaar.
Shopping done it was off to Flurys for cake and coffee, or in my case coke.
As I grew older I would fo on my own or with my freinds and we would spend hours trying on shoes, buying thirty of forty of the beautifully coloured glass bangles that would match our dresses and leave us with myriad cuts on our arms when the bangles inevetably broke. At one point I was sent to see if anyone was selling tiger skins - of course they were and so much more beside. A moira (a whicker stool) could be ordered and hashish packed into the seat and then sent by freight to the UK or US. For a time I felt like Mata Hari.
You see with memories like these - a sterile mall filled with shops that are all identical is no place for real shopping. Sadly those paper Christmas decorations caused a fire that consumed Hogg's New Market and although it has been restored I believe much of its charm has been sanitised. Memories can't have that happen to them thank God.
It has to do with, like so much else in my life, Calcutta, and how the experience of shopping there formed my buying habits. To shop in Calcutta was to walk into an adventure. The New Market, a Victorian mall in fact, was laid out in such a way as to invite you to experience the world. Avenues of shoe shops, side alleys filled with flowers, curio shops that would have had Dickens frantically rewriting The Old Curiosity Shop.
To go with my mother as a small baba meant following her to Empire Stores where jealously guarded imported goods were produced like jewels for her inspection: tins of baked beans, canned smoked oysters and even Kool Aid were brandished and bought. Further on the meat market, best walked through with a fixed stare and holding one's breath. We went through and out the other side - the cook was sent to buy the meat. Just next door the fish market - again the smell was overwhelming but here we would stop and look for lobsters, bekti and hilsa. Huge prawns would be added to the growing pile of goods that Old Buddha balanced on his head.
I would always beg to go through the animal markets, birds, parrots and budgerigars, rabbiits, white and pied and monkeys - oh how I wanted a monkey. All it took however to make me quiet again was the repetition of how if bitten I would have to have ten injections - all in my stomach - to innoculate me against rabies. Even now, I hesitate to pat a strange dog such was the power of that particular moral tale.
All provision shopping done we would head into the main market with its lanes and alleys spiralling out from the centre where, at Christmas, the Chinese would sell paper chains and lanterns. A favourite stop was Chumbu Lama, a tiny shop owned by a Tibetan refugee - in a similar manner to Emipire Stores he would reach into the back of the shop and treasures would be brought out to be viewed. Exquisite bronze buddhas, ropes of turquoise and coral; the tresaures of a refugee race forced to sell their heritage to live in a strange land. Every piece had a story and most were heart breaking. I don't remember Mum buying much - simply listening and sometimes returning with Desmond or letting Chogyal know that soemthing rare was in the bazaar.
Shopping done it was off to Flurys for cake and coffee, or in my case coke.
As I grew older I would fo on my own or with my freinds and we would spend hours trying on shoes, buying thirty of forty of the beautifully coloured glass bangles that would match our dresses and leave us with myriad cuts on our arms when the bangles inevetably broke. At one point I was sent to see if anyone was selling tiger skins - of course they were and so much more beside. A moira (a whicker stool) could be ordered and hashish packed into the seat and then sent by freight to the UK or US. For a time I felt like Mata Hari.
You see with memories like these - a sterile mall filled with shops that are all identical is no place for real shopping. Sadly those paper Christmas decorations caused a fire that consumed Hogg's New Market and although it has been restored I believe much of its charm has been sanitised. Memories can't have that happen to them thank God.
