Peanut butter in the high street...

For one reason and another, today my mind kept returning to the town I was born and, as I made myself a peanut butter sandwich this morning, my old friend Peter Wright.

Peter's dad was the local sign-writer and I daresay he painted most, if not all, of the shop signs in this picture. Peter's mum kept a couple of demijohn's bubbling away on top her fridge - elderflower or parsnip, I don't know which - and Peter was the first boy I knew to eat peanut butter.

Peanuts and butter? Urgh! That didn't sound right.

For years I avoided eating peanut butter. As a child, growing up in a world of corner shops and grocers, peanut butter seemed very exotic, something that Americans ate on TV shows like My Three Sons, and 77 Sunset Strip. Of course there weren’t any supermarkets in our town, they were years away, and we bought our bread from the bakers, meat from the butchers, beer from the off-license, vegetables from the greengrocers, clothes from the haberdashers and you couldn’t buy peanut butter anywhere. How different things were back then, specific shops selling specific goods, when going shopping meant walking along the high street and entering half a dozen buildings simply to get the ingredients for the Sunday roast.

Food Town the grocers, Newitts the butchers, I can't remember the bakers name or that of the greengrocer who displayed his cabbages on North Street. Back then vegetables and fruit were seasonal, spaghetti came in tins, and bean sprouts were… well, just what were bean sprouts? Supermarkets changed all that.

With supermarkets came the one stop shop, a huge variety of food from all over the world, seasonality became a thing of the past and of course they were cheaper because of their buying power. Suddenly the wine merchants in Butter Market were struggling, the greengrocer and the haberdasher too. One by one the bakers, boutiques and butchers closed their doors, locked up shop and left along with a way of life that had existed for hundreds of years.

I guess Peter's dad was put out of business too, but I did get my peanut butter and, despite what I'd imagined as a boy, it wasn't made out of milk after all.