Every village needs a kebab shop

‘A diary?’ said the lady in the chintzy gift shop, pronouncing the word very much as Edith Evans said ‘handbag’ in the 1952 film of The Importance of Being Earnest.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘a diary. Do you have one?’ I was standing in the middle of a shop so like one that would sell a diary that I could not express quite adequately how obvious I thought it was that they might.

This gift shop and café is on the high street of the village where I live and is easily one of the prettiest gift shop/cafés you have ever seen. It has every kind of pretty thing inside, from greetings cards and novelty books about wellbeing to china cups, shawls and rugs, lamps, pictures and doggy-themed place mats.

‘No!’ said the lady, who is usually very friendly, but now seemed put out as I perused a book that was divided into days, like a journal, but did not have the dates. ‘We are too specialist to sell diaries,’ is what I think she said. But also, I think she might have said they were not specialist enough.

All I could deduce, because I didn’t hear her properly, was that a diary was either too special or not sufficiently special to be sold here. I looked around, still unwilling to believe there wasn’t a novelty-themed book with dates on each page somewhere in this Aladdin’s cave of everything a yummy mummy with time on her hands would want.

For this is their haven, their domain, their mecca. They sit here Ugg-booted and teddy-coated day in day out, along with those older Surrey ladies of a certain age, in puffas, who sit sipping lattes while talking loudly about Those People who won’t have the vaccine. It’s a miracle they can swallow the coffee considering the indignation of it all.

Occasionally, these ladies must buy something while queuing at the counter to buy coffee, which is why the shelves are heaving with the sorts of things such ladies might buy, which is to say fripperies and niceties.