The Charity shop …

This longer piece is a story …

The Charity Shop

Along with its distinctive old, used and dusty smell with overfilled racks and shelves this charity shop was no different to the others in the street, between the vape shops, coffee shops and nail bars that had gradually and seemingly unnoticed encroached on the town centre.  Here, at the end of a busy day young mums browsed the racks while children played beneath bemused by the outmoded and broken toys.  Old mums ponder on the coming spring and their meagre wardrobe.   Students selected a random collection of pots and pans for their bedsit kitchens. A man having reached for a suitable pair of shoes, idly flipped through and mused upon the records and their battered sleeves stacked beside the DVDs and CDs, and the bookcase crammed with well-thumbed novels and picture books. 

A volunteer in a bid to rearrange a jumbled corner selected some framed prints and posters encouraged that the students were interested in decorating the walls of their shabby accommodation. 

However, a handful of prints, faded, and way passed their former glory were put aside in case the frames had any value.  Picasso from his acclaimed blue period along with Matisse, Kandinsky and Degas; once would have hung over the mantlepiece, along a dark passage or strategically placed over an unsightly stain. 

It was the day before lockdown; no longer fit for purpose the prints removed from their frames.   Released, from suspended animation they could join hands and dance to the sounds of the old guitarist. The waiting ballerina distanced from her tutor, pirouetted across the shabby lino floor and the blue boy and the girl waltzed below the shelf of miss matched crockery the two girls rearranged the chair to win favourable glances.