"If we shadows have offended"

People buying a lot of Halloween merchandise. I was talking to a couple about the end of Summer Celtic Festival and whether the need for fire to try to bring back summer is just part of the human condition. Mind you like the Mother in “Oranges aren’t the only fruit” I believe there is a lot of paganism in the Cheadle Hulme area

Chatted to a woman about Bomber Command the husband had a badge of a Lancaster Bomber on his jacket. Her uncle still around in his 90s was shot down in a Lancaster and crashed in the English Channel. His two mates who were also shot down were later killed in 1947 on the Grind on Food drop crash in the appalling winter of that year. The man put his survival to wearing a Mae West jacket. The next customer also had a relative in Bomber Command who was shot down over France and was hidden by a French farmer who passed the man off as a relative from Canada. The man who was from Endon fortunately spoke fluent French.

I spoke to two workers from Sainsburys which is what I like to do when I am in another store. Both men were friendly although the one who worked at Hanley said that that store was going through tough times and there was a threat of redundancies. So much for building a sound economy on retail in Hanley. I could also point out trying to build a sound economy by growing use of “ zero hours “ contracts which both the City and Health Authority are using is not going to work either. I don’t think that Mr JVDL “shining city on a hill” future for Stoke has much of a hope unless I have misread the situation

We talk about the gathering gloom. I say cheerful to the woman shopper that after 21^st December- St Lucy’s Day- it starts to get brighter. There is a Nocturne by John Donne on the shortest day of the year “Hydroptique balm has shrunk”, I think it starts. I like the Metaphysics but they are not easy to understand

Talk of poetry leads me to ask man shopper if he recalls any at school. He did “Midsummer Nights Dream and I do the bit at the end “ If we shadows have offended, think but this and all be mended, that you have but slumbered here whilst these visions did appear”. I often do that at the till slumber that is