Three Hours from Spain 7

Shopping – Oxford Street

Friday        Day 6

Carmen, Ana and Maria

MARIA:     Oxford Street!  Just look at it!  Thousands of people!  Hundreds of shops!  And we have all morning to go round them! No problems!

CARMEN:  Except money!

ANA:          How do we make any progress? It’s as if a hundred cinemas had just emptied all the people on the street at the same time at the end of the film.

MARIA:     Except that it’s like this all day.  Everyone marching ahead, from shop to shop.

CARMEN:  I’d like to go to Selfridges first.

MARIA:     What’s in Selfridges?

CARMEN:  Everything!  (She consults her book) Women’s clothes, men’s clothes, kids’ clothes. The Sienna Café, the Gordon Bar.

MARIA:     The Gordon Bar?

CARMEN:  Yes, it’s named after Gordon Selfridge, the American who founded the store in 1909.  The first big department store in Britain.  It really put Oxford Street on the map!

ANA:           Is there a restaurant?

CARMEN:  Of course there’s a restaurant!  There are several.  What about the Obika Mozzarella Bar?

ANA:           It sounds OK.

MARIA:     It sounds expensive!

CARMEN:  Well, we’ll see.  Come on!

They went round Selfridges, and bought a lot of tea and shortbread to give as presents to friends back in Madrid.  Then, for a change of scene and for relative peace and quiet, they crossed over to Waterstones, the bookshop. 

MARIA:     Waterstones.  That’s a funny name.  “Agua piedras”.

CARMEN:  It’s a good bookshop, though.

MARIA:     It says here that you can browse at leisure.  What does “browse” mean?

CARMEN:  It means looking through a book, reading a bit here and a bit there, without any hurry and without having to buy it.  In the dark ages 20 years ago some people read whole novels like that, just coming for ten minutes every day.

MARIA:     And now they download e-books from Project Gutenburg. O tempora!  O mores!

CARMEN:  And since when have you been quoting Cicero?

MARIA:     As I’m not allowed to speak Spanish, I have to fall back on the next best thing, Latin, where it all comes from.  But nobody in the world knows Latin any more.  Alas!  O tempora! O mores!

CARMEN:  As you said before! Anyway, going back to “browsing”.   “Browse” originally referred to cows or sheep eating grass in a field.  They ate a bit of grass here, a bit of grass there.

ANA:           I’ve seen the word on my computer.

CARMEN:  Yes, there you are. The computer looks around for something here and there, just like cows and sheep.  That’s what happens with words.

MARIA:     What happens with words?

CARMEN:  Well, a word means different things according to what people need to use it for.  Browse was for cows, and then it was for books and now it’s for the computer. Life moves on. For every time it’s used to talk about cows, it appears a thousand times on computers.  Look at  “mouse”.  

MARIA:     Mickey Mouse!

CARMEN:  That’s right.  But now it’s used much more often for the thing you use with your computer! You have to have a word for new inventions, new ideas, new customs. It’s fascinating!

MARIA:     Well, not exactly fascinating.  Just of momentary interest I would say!

CARMEN:  Maria!

MARIA:     But I see what you mean.

CARMEN:  OK, so what does “flatpack” mean?

MARIA:     No idea!

ANA:           Something that’s packed all flat.

CARMEN:  It’s furniture from Ikea!

ANA:           Ah yes, it’s all flat.  You can put it in the car.

MARIA:     And then you spend the rest of the day putting it together!  I once bought a …

ANA:           Look, there’s a coffee shop here.  I’m dying for a drink.

CARMEN:  OK, let’s have a coffee, then have half an hour looking at books, then meet at the coffee shop again.

MARIA:     OK, I think I’ll stay at the coffee shop all the time.

After coffee Carmen went to the section on Shakespeare, and Ana to the books on quantum theory. Everyone to her own!  Maria took longer over her coffee and then found the medical section with books on digestive enzymes.   They met again after half an hour.

CARMEN:  What was your coffee like, Maria?

MARIA:     Very nice. Then to check what was happening to my coffee I found this book on the digestive system.  I’ve been looking for it for ages.  It’s much cheaper here than in Madrid.  Just look at the diagrams! The digestive system is fascinating!

CARMEN:  Well, not fascinating.  Just of momentary interest I would say!

MARIA:     OK.  Thank you, Carmen! Now where?

CARMEN:  Debenham’s?

ANA:          Lunch.

CARMEN:  Marks and Spencers?

MARIA:     Lunch.

CARMEN:  Clarks shoes?

MARIA:     Its lunchtime.  Let’s go back to the Mozzarella thingy in Selfridges.

CARMEN:  Right. At least we’ll be able to sit down somewhere.   

No matter which direction you walk in Oxford Street there always seem to be more people coming the other way! Despite this, they finally made it back to Selfridges for lunch in the Obika Mozzarella Bar.  The food was really good but, as Maria had predicted, it was also rather expensive.  Then, after lunch, Carmen and Ana met Calum and Harry at Shakespeare’s Globe.  Calum had bought tickets to see “Much Ado About Nothing” that afternoon.  Maria didn’t want to see Shakespeare, so she found a comfortable pub, ordered a pint of Guinness and sat down to read about the digestive tract and to wonder about the attraction of a play that by its own admission was a lot of fuss about nothing at all.