For Tylers

I moan too much and, being of an essentially sunny disposition, I'm not going to get cross about Gordon Brown losing our personal details and opening up half of the country to indentity theft and stupendous personal losses. I will, however, being of sunny disposition, point out the big upside of this story which is that New Labour's swivel-eyed determination to construct  a surveillance state seems to be at an end. Brown's dream of our own stasi are over. No, my real subject matter this morning is a shop in Notting Hill Gate. It is called Tylers, though we know it as 'the shop that sells everything'. At first glance it does not seem promising with a window full of artificial flowers and various indeterminate objects. Inside a series of tall, stacked aisles are organised according to a plan that still defeats me. But, trust me, you will find what you want. I always have. Yesterday I wanted something rather complicated - basically a bolt, the ends of which had to be sawn off. One of the staff waited patiently for my faltering explanation to end. He first offered me a length of threaded steel about three feet long, changed his mind, opened a packet of bolts, took out one, checked the size, took it to a vice, sawed, cleaned up, checked, laughed amiably at my lack of the correct expert vocabulary and charged me £1.25. Everywhere else in over-rich London, people snarl at me and try to gouge me for every penny I own. But Tylers is a shop from the past, a shop undiscovered by management insultants and marketing swine. It is a shop with ethos. It is also a startling anomaly. The surrounding stores are Tesco, O2, Boots, W.H.Smith and so on. The big, boring chains are, generally, the only shops that can afford the absurdly high rents around here. I can't imagine how Tylers survives, though it seems to be run by an old Asian family who may have had the sense of grab to freehold when they could. Or, perhaps, it simply makes a lot of money. This is quite possible if there a few thousand people like me. I now feel I need to go to Tylers every day. I think of some obscure thing I might buy and step through the dodgy automatic doors just in case it's in there. It always is. This can't be done with Boots or Tesco because I know exactly what's in there - the same things that are in every other Boots and Tesco. All shops should be like Tylers. But only Tylers is like Tylers. To one of my sunny disposition, it is an unalloyed delight. The news that Osama had exploded a nuke in Central London or Brown had lost all our personal details would send me straight to Tylers. It's safe there and I bet they'd have iodine pills and a radiation protection suit.