Woeful Wonder of Woolies - Article

That's the woeful wonder of Woolies

Only one high street store could have provided a cheap counterblast to the excesses of the boom
Giles Coren
The death of Woolworths has dealt a serious blow to those of us who had been quietly celebrating the onset of recession as a counterbalance to the recent years of greed and slickness, and had hoped that it would herald the arrival of a new austerity.
Secretly, I had been longing for a return to the stiff, cold, clip-voiced, monochromatic world of the early 1950s, or the Blitz, or the Great Depression or the three-day week section of the 1970s, or, indeed, any of the impoverished and perilous periods of our recent past, which by rights ought to have been depressing, relentless and smelly, but about which old people bang on endlessly with a tear in the eye, remembering mostly the songs and the shagging.
I was all set to crack out a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles and a flat cap, grow a pencil moustache and belt my trousers around my armpits. I was looking forward to rubbish piled high in the streets, shoeless children in grey shorts playing cricket with shards of Spitfire in bombed-out cathedrals, family gatherings round the radio to hear optimistic prognostications from Gordon Brown (delivered from his nuclear bunker 10,000ft beneath the Peak District), three-mile walks to get the milk, scratchy woollen Home Guard fatigues, boiled horsemeat and other things that could, in later years, be funnelled willy-nilly into sentences beginning: “When I were a lad...”
Because to have filled my house with stuff from Woolworths would have been to embrace properly the deflated spirit of the age. It is the place where you can get absolutely everything, but in its crappest form. The same stuff as everywhere else, only worse.
If you didn't want to spend 40 quid on fairy lights for the Christmas tree, you could spend £4 on fairy lights from Woolies. They wouldn't actually light up, of course, and when you gave one of the bulbs a tweak to check it was screwed in properly you'd get all your teeth blown out of your head and your hair set on fire. You might spend the rest of Christmas in A&E, but the main thing was you were only down £4.
And if £9 seemed too much for a glass pie dish from John Lewis then you could get one from Woolies for £2.50 that would be smashed into a thousand pieces by the time you got it home on the bus (Woolworths customers always go home on the bus). And if it wasn't, then it would shatter as soon as you turned on the oven.
Woolworths was for people who had no money but still wanted to buy things: “Only £3 for this lidless thermos flask?” “A mere fiver for this AM-only radio with a battery flap that doesn't quite close?” Best of all, it was sold to you by a surly woman wearing a badly pilled, red polyester fleece who suspected you of shoplifting. Oh, the wonder of it.
I love the crapola Britain signified by Woolies, and was so hoping that we would be driven back to it. I thought in these hard times it would be all the new shops and services that would go - all the fancy foreign imports, the good coffee, the colourful food, the sexy clothes, the slick technology - and that Britain would return to those days of long and seemingly endless yore when all things British were rubbish, and we just didn't care.
But the closure of Woolies suggests that the traditional core values of what I fondly call “Crap Britain” are going to be lost, after all. Look at Little Chef. Only yesterday the relaunch by Heston Fancy-Pants Blumenthal was unveiled at Popham in Hampshire. It's all free-range eggs, green tea trifle and 72-hour braised ox-cheeks. And there was I, looking forward to embracing the grimness of the current climate by pulling off a wet dual carriageway to sit at a greasy table, swallowing slices of clumsily slaughtered factory pig washed down with bog-water coffee, then getting knifed by a trucker in the outside loo.
Woolies, Little Chef, what next? Ginsters? Panda Pops? Mr Whippy? It's all going. Almost all gone. The grey, damp, crappy underbelly of the ancient British consumer culture is being stripped away, and when this crash reaches its lowest point, who knows now what we will find there?
Gordon Brown tried this week to keep Woolworths afloat till Christmas. At first glance it might look very strange for a government to want to sustain a chain of shops that is worthy but broken, anachronistic, shabby, grim, depressing and with no viable future. But then he's only human. And I guess he knows just how it feels.


2) What techniques does Giles Coren use to interest his readers in the recent Woolworths story?

(Adjusted from Giles Coren's Article from the Times: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/giles_coren/article5254250.ece)