Space Rockets and Corner Shops

We're in Cape Canaveral tonight, (and I've never been able to write THAT before!) in preparation for the next couple of days at the Kennedy Space Centre - or Center as they tend to spell it round here.

I can't remember a time when I wasn't interested in space travel - after all, the Apollo missions took place during my teenage years, so how could I not be? So visiting the Kennedy Space Center has long been an impossible dream of mine - and tomorrow I'll be there. At the moment we're in a hotel with a space-suit in the foyer, which is encouraging.

But today, as we drove North past signs that said amazing things like Daytona Beach, Silverback asked me if I'm blase about all the signs along the road yet.

Big signs for everything from hospitals to restaurant chains to family businesses, all along the roads for miles and miles - and then agricultural land, with an interesting mixture of palm trees, cypresses, conifers and many other trees and shrubs that I can't identify at all. Considering that Florida is so flat, I wasn't expecting the countryside to be so pretty but, especially in the evening sunlight as we drove up to Titusville, the colours were beautiful.

But to answer Silverback's question, no, I'm not blase yet - every half an hour I think, with a sudden jolt as we pass a mall or a Taco Bell restaurant or something worded in a particularly American way - - hey, I'm in America!

It has a somewhat strange effect of making me remember how things used to be. Because when I was a child, there were no malls - - no shopping centres, no supermarkets. England was a land of corner shops.

There were lots round our way, and we called them by the surname of the owners. To the end of the road and turn right and you would reach Caldron's in about a hundred yards. Caldron's was a grocer's and sold tinned food, flour, sugar, cereal - - and cooked ham, which would be cut on request with a large meat slicer.

The first time I went to that corner on my own was on New Year's Day 1964 - the shop was closed of course but I felt proud to have reached it all by myself. I felt suffused with new-found independence and thrilled at the thought of the new year to come. I knew I'd always remember the moment, and I have.

To the end of the road and turn left and you'd get to the nearest thing to a supermarket that we had - another grocer's known as The Thrift, where you did the unusual thing of wandering round and helping yourself to goods which you put in a basket.

Next to The Thrift was the butcher's - a proper butcher with a bloodstained apron. I would often be sent there for pork chops or some meat for our dog.

And across the road was Perrin's the greengrocer's. Mr Perrin was always cheerful and I've found that to be true of most greengrocers since. Sometimes my mother would ring him with an order and a boy on a bike would cycle round with a basket full of carrots and apples and cauliflowers.

Across the road in the other direction from Perrin's was the Post Office. And across the road from that was another little grocer's, Beevors, but my mother didn't like that shop because he tended to serve customers in whatever order he felt like, disregarding the queue.

Just up the road was Jones the draper's, and then you got to what was known as The Parade, where there was yet another- though inferior - butcher, and another post office, and Turnbull's the bakers (their Yorkshire curd tart has never been bettered in my experience) and another greengrocer's.

All these little shops within a few hundred yards of our house!

Of course, I still live in the same house as I did then: what has happened to all these shops?

All the corner shops have closed, without exception, and have been turned into houses with strangely large plate-glass windows in the front.

The Thrift has gone: both butchers: all the grocers. The Post Office on the corner has gone. The other one, on the Parade, remains, and is now Bhogal's. It has taken over the old baker's shop next door and, ironically, has become a little grocer's as well as a newsagent and post office.

In my childhood, certainly, Britain definitely seemed to be the famous "nation of shopkeepers"and it's strange that the very, very different American shopping experience of malls and supermarkets should make me think of that time, when we took the idea of shopping in lots of small shops completely for granted. We thought it would always be that way. We were wrong.

And here I am in a hotel room in Cape Canaveral, thinking about a few streets - four thousand miles away! - that have played such a big part in my life.