Christmas food shopping- a new way?

I admit that I don't shop that often. I wouldn't say that I was the main shopper in our household. Yet I did find myself authorized to do some food shopping before Christmas and I found myself experiencing nostalgia not really for the items on offer but the methods of shopping.
I'll start with a general gripe. The expression 'stocking fillers' in bold type seemed to me to send out the wrong signals to any young child who could read but still believed in Father Christmas.
Then there is the question of customer service. However good the training, it just is not possible to get sufficient information, sufficiently easily if you are shopping in an aircraft hangar of a building that sells a huge variety of goods and cannot therefore have so much expertise on tap. Specifically on food however there was something about being able to  smell and examine vegetables and fruit for example without them being wrapped and packed and plastered in stickers, which has now disappeared from many shops.
I stuck lucky in Crediton- our local market town. Firstly I could drive right into the centre and park. There were spouts available in sufficient quantity and loose and not in shrink wrapped packets of six! There is, Alleluia, a cheese shop selling, amongst others, local cheeses that the 'big' food retailers now seem to have withdrawn from their shelves ( not surprising that the dairy farms are struggling). There is an ironmonger too.
Do you remember those card games of 'happy families' that we played as children? Mr Bun the Baker for example. The pack of cards would be small today.
Much has been said about the 'death of the High Street' and I accept that urban planning is challenged in this area. Product price is an issue as is convenience and cheap or free parking. I just wonder whether there is a model that allows independent shops to come together and offer a combined facility for customers which will enable them to survive against the advantages of the large retailers.
There would need to be a way of drawing in outside investment and the independents too would need some equity share and the planners would have to be on side. It would provide a more secure and sustainable outlet for those farms who supply farmers markets. #justsaying
I hope that you had a good Christmas and that 2016 is good for you

Two great men

This coming Friday will see the funeral and memorial service for Henry McCreath in Berwick-upon-Tweed. This coming Friday is also the 50th anniversary of the funeral of Winston Churchill.
I make no apology for mentioning them in a blog about rural matters.
Henry McCreath was born in June 1915 in Berwick.

Most of his career was in the grain trade- early on in the family grain business and, after the war, in the same business that he resurrected with his brother Geoff (another great man) who was my father-in-law (H.G.McCreath & Co). He had a distinguished career being well known to farmers in the Borders and Northumberland, being President of the UK Agricultural Supply Trade Association in 1972/3, being a J.P. and chairman of the bench and finally being given honorary Freedom of Berwick at the age of 96, three years ago.
He was a man of great determination which not only served him well in business but also in his greatest challenge; surviving the Japanese Prisoner of War Camps in Changi and along the Burma/Siam railway and the river Kwai. He was taken prisoner only a week after arriving in Singapore as a Captain in the 9th Northumberland Fusiliers yet throughout his incarceration was committed to the men who served with him.
For many years the only people with whom he could talk about his horrendous experiences were the others who knew what it was like- the members of his local FEPoW (Far East Prisoners of War) group for example. I suspect that farmers too were good to deal with in that respect- straightforward, no-nonsense and not too obviously emotional. Farming is a fairly solitary occupation after all.
I was at school near Westerham in Kent where Winston Churchill lived for the last few years of his life near his beloved Chartwell.

I remember, as a young boy, going to wave up at his upstairs window at which he appeared on his 90th birthday. I remember too the activity surrounding the date of his death, the church service in the local church and then the pageantry of his funeral.
In some ways flawed, in others inspirational, he too will be associated with the 2nd World War. Like Henry he too appreciated the countryside whether it was portraying it in his painting or encouraging the farmers and Land Girls in their wartime production.
So it is time to remember two great men; leaders in peacetime and in war whose funerals coincide 50 years apart.