Why is it that whenever I go into Boots the Chemist, I find myself standing lost and confused in front of the tampon shelf? One day, I’m going steal an ancient parchment blueprint of the shop, enter through exactly the right door, head straight for the escalator and find they’ve put the tampon shelf across the top of it with no way off the moving staircase; an impenetrable wall of winged, sanitary demons bearing down on me with crushing messages of absorbency and free living.
Boots the Chemist wasn’t always so.
Before the days of easy applicators and compact multi-packs that fit in your handbag, Boots sported an awe-inspiring sea of entertainment based consumerism. Nowhere would you find Ainsley Harriet’s protracted length of well polished ivories promoting a multitude of useless, disposable kitchen implements from every shelf (except those reserved for Claire Raynor).
Boots served the computer gamer, film buff and music lover with unrivalled tenacity.
This was a chemist of culture; a pharmacy of the philosophical.In my local Boots, the computer games were upstairs against the back wall; one half of which had been converted to a continuous counter not dissimilar to a futuristic bar - stout of girth to accommodate the many tills, cabinets and leaning space required for the hundreds of computer games that passed over the brilliant white Formica of fortune every Saturday.
Perpendicular to the long games bar were the A-frame shelves, arranged (perhaps innocently – perhaps knowingly) so the Spectrum gamers and C64 gamers prowled their respective shelves back-to-back. Despite occasionally looking like a geek’s rendition of West Side Story, this tenuously united the two warring factions - ever so briefly - against the Amstrad pussies whose (half) shelf backed onto the toddler’s “learn-as-you-play” building blocks and wooden, pull-along centipedes. How we laughed the scornful, mocking laugh of the narcissistic youth!
At between £7 and £10 for a full price game, a frugal month would afford us maybe one game each – depending how many times we buckled under the pressure of a single cassette box budget during the week. So you can imagine our amazement on that wonderful Saturday when the be-spotted till jockey in his shiny nylon tie stamped a new special offer card.
