Lost for ever, the bloody beauty of my butcher

I AM very lucky to live in Oxford, a beautiful, prosperous city. One of its best features is a handsome 18th Century covered market. But it is slowly turning into a tourist attraction.

Last year, almost certainly finished off by the Covid panic, the baker’s closed.

Now our favourite butcher’s shop is closing, too, because fewer and fewer people can be bothered to go to proper shops when the supermarkets can deliver.

The next generation will never see such a place in all its carnivorous splendour, nor be able to watch the skilled butchers at work. Nor will they see the shop in the week before Christmas, its outside walls hung with dozens of turkeys and geese and whole wild boar and deer, dripping blood on the pavement, like something out of Dickens.

And we’ll never again join the long, happy queue on Christmas Eve, winding round the market alleyways and avenues.

I’m sure some people now disapprove of this sort of thing anyway. But I am sorry to see it go and I am glad that I saw it when it was still there. Because within 20 years or so, the way of life I knew will be defamed and misrepresented, to make the modern age look good. I have this feeling a lot, nowadays.