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27/8/2020 1 Comment

Sweet experiences for young and old

Although Mr Simms Worcester is essentially a retro brand, we do have a range of products that suit all ages – from Toxic Waste and Pez Dispensers for young children through Sour Patch Kids for students of psychology and clinical depression to Golden Humbugs for those older people not particularly looking forward to Christmas.

Of course, with this come widely different attitudes to life inside our sweet shop. Many children are delighted to enter our magical little world and expect Harry Potter to emerge from the wall marked 9 ¾ at any moment – if that doesn’t happen, he has left us chocolate Frogs, Botts and Slugs to remember him by.

We have been students more recently than we were children and enjoy the friendly banter that seems to symbolise the University of Worcester. It’s so nice to be able to pick and mix sweets for those who will shortly be heading out into the world to pick and choose exciting career paths, although we hope they will remember the few minutes they spent with us too, having fun.

Like many older people, Michelle and I have had a life full of experiences, travelling and sharing (often re-living) memories with our three wonderful children. For some, though, life has been a solitary existence or suddenly become lonely; a trip to a sweet shop can be poignant but also hopefully therapeutic after a good chat and a reminisce over ‘Lucky Bags’ or ‘Spangles’ we all enjoyed as children in the ‘Sixties.

We have a regular old gentleman who comes in for Barley Sugars. He told us once that he was ninety year’s old and had just come back from ‘motoring around Devon and Cornwall.’ Always immaculately turned out in three-piece suit, tie and top pocket silk handkerchief I do imagine him driving straight out of the Wind in the Willows.

Another upright gentleman in blazer and military tie who has had medical issues lately – he told me in remarkably intimate detail about his rectal examination at Worcester Royal – came in this week especially to show me some photographs of him and his comrades outside Worcester Guildhall on a Remembrance Sunday forgotten by most. They were lovely images and he was full of pride in telling me about each person featured.

“I have lots more of these back at home!” he told me delightedly, and so glad of someone to share his life with. “I had to give all my medals away, of course.” He says this in such a matter-of-fact way that it makes me as sad as the fact that I know he has done so because he has no family. He tells me this often. I know also that he goes back to a tiny bedsit in a grand house’ that isn’t what it was’ in an area that’s ‘gone downhill in the last fifty years.’ I know this because he tells me often - sometimes twice a day - because he has nobody else to tell his news to.

One little Japanese boy (of no more than three years on this earth) had plenty to say when he popped in to see us last week. Unfortunately, it was in Japanese. His mother was more interested in the history of our building and then the history of Worcester itself so I gave her a verbal guided tour of Powick, through The Commandery, King Charles’s House and The Guildhall before ending back on the High Street.

Her little boy had been chatting happily to himself throughout my lecture while she listened, fascinated, or perhaps had perfected the art of sleeping soundly with her eyes open.

When I was fifteen, I went on an ‘exchange trip’ to France, armed with a French-English / English-French Collins Phrasebook and a teenager’s determination to thrive in exotic destinations. On the way over on the coach I had revised a particular phrase that I thought would be appropriate. Once settled into a little farmhouse with a farmer, his wife, three children and three blind mice, I cleared my throat dramatically, pulled myself up to my full height of at least fifteen inches and asked the pertinent question of the hour in a quite breath-taking French accent: “Excuse me, sir, but could you please tell me from which platform the midnight train from Marseilles leaves?”

Looks of astonishment and a silence that seems to last for the whole two weeks followed.

Our little friend had clearly consulted his Japanese-English / English-Japanese Collins Phrasebook before visiting us because, as he left, clutching six pieces of Pineapple Rock he turned slowly and wished us a cheerful “Farewell, and look after all of your babies.”

We shall. Young and old.

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20/8/2020 0 Comments

Some of you may remember one of my previous blog posts in which I mentioned Pierre our poltergeist – and that a little boy had confidently told me that ‘he’ was a ‘she’, and called Sarah?

Well, Pierre/Sarah has been especially active this week in hurling bags of Cotswold Fudge Company products across the floor but, curiously, only the vegan varieties of vanilla, sea salt and chocolate. Maybe Pierre/Sarah is a carnivore and objects to alternative food chains? Perhaps we should store bags of pink pigs or white mice on those shelves instead by way of an experiment?

Yesterday, Michelle was filling up the slush machine with a new variety – mango (which is delicious as well as being yellow) – whereupon the machine suddenly stopped working for no reason. Almost immediately, a packet of vanilla fudge shot out from the shelf and landed by her feet … and the machine began working again as though there had been no silent pause in proceedings. Perhaps Pierre/Sarah has some bad history in the West Indies, or even the West Midlands?

I do worry whether there is a connection between our irritable spirit and strange movements from upstairs. Ever since we’ve been in the building – which was built in the 1750s – we have each individually or collectively heard sounds from the floor above. We don’t actually have access to that floor from the shop, and you can only reach it from Fish Street via a roll-up door which (roll up, roll up for our next trick) is always rolled down and locked.

The floor above our shop has been up for rent ever since we first came to Worcester in February 2018 to look for prospective shop premises. Our immediate neighbours have closed down – without even saying goodbye – and the Currency Exchange further along from them is also closed because many people can’t seem to exchange pleasantries at the moment, let alone coins minted with Covid.

So, the rooms above us simply stop at walls separating them from more empty rooms further on. There is no possibility of sounds from beyond being referred back to us. Or perhaps this activity is from much further beyond the ‘normal’ parameters of time and space? I hope the sounds aren’t coming from the opposite direction i.e. across Fish Street as that would mean they originate in St Helen’s church; my own personal knowledge of spirits feels a bit safer when restricted to Bailey’s chocolate or the Famous Grouse toffees we sell in our own earthly environment.

We have heard heavy footsteps and furniture being dragged along the floor at various times of the day, or softer footsteps that are more akin to children skipping and jumping. On each occasion one of us has rushed round to see if the steel roll-up door was still closed and locked. I think you already knew that it was.

We also experienced flashes of white light on Monday. We’re not normally open on Mondays as we sadly had to make three members of staff redundant, so it is the only day that Michelle and I get to spend some time off together as we are otherwise in the shop on ghost watching duty (though we will be open for the next two Mondays up to and including the Bank Holiday). Anyway, this Monday saw the shop temporarily converted into a small studio for a photoshoot of a whole range of new products from our new brand: The Sweet Lorry.

When we were first setting up the shop a lovely young couple pressed their noses up against the glass to see what was going on. We let them in for a sneak preview and they became our first customers (bubble gum bottles). We later found out that Dan is a photographer with expertise in product photography so was duly asked to come in for seven hours to shoot our new range of gift boxes and wicker hampers full of chocolate, fudge, and sweets.

Each hamper is themed and has a pub name (see what spirits can drive you to!) such as The Ginger Route, The Coffee Pot and The Whisky Pamper. This will primarily be an online brand (website due in September if my sorrows don’t drown me first), but we have an installation in the shop on Worcester High Street so do come along and see what we’re up to.

Finally, I just wanted to say how lovely it is to have our near neighbours at Côte Brasserie open for business again. Lovely people and absolutely fantastic food. I have really missed their collection of outside tables and chairs and made that exact point to Michelle this morning as I inadvertently walked into one of them. Maybe my head was in the clouds as usual, or maybe something beyond the clouds was having fun at my expense?

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13/8/2020 0 Comments

After the heat, the cold slight of day

Can anyone tell me who said this: “I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn't know how to get along without it.”

The answer is at the end of this article for those who feel the need to scroll down.

Most people will prefer to take their time, just as they do in our sweet shop, reading words on jars of boiled sweets – establishing which are vegan or sugar-free – or flavours of chocolate or fudge (salted caramel is still our best seller), but some will jump to conclusions.

A second question: can anyone remember the ice cream wars of East Glasgow in the 1980s? A violent turf war, it provoked outrage in those communities because ice cream vans were being used by rival gangs to sell drugs and stolen goods. Families were intimidated and people died. The hapless Strathclyde Police were given the nickname "the serious chimes squad" as a result.

You may think I have been sucking on a Victory V before writing this (see last week’s piece) but I can assure you that I am as calm and collected as a small child ensuring that their pocket money goes as far as it can on their pick n’ mix selection, whilst also providing for as much variation as possible.

I mention ice cream because Michelle and I were caught up in a dispute this week that at one point threatened to blow our cornets. A local ice cream seller told us just after lockdown of his attention to set up a permanent location by the Elgar Statue and that he had applied for a street trading license to do so.

We put in an objection on the grounds that families, struggling as we all are, would exit the NCP Car Park or hit the High Street after visits to the cathedral and see his site before ours. The inevitable choice would be ice cream or sweets, and that this would give him an unfair advantage.

We were ourselves planning to bring in a small ice cream selection to the shop, but floods and virus led to such large financial losses that it had been put on hold. Being asked to pay full rent during lockdown, and a return to very high business rates next year, things are not looking good.

Our fellow trader subsequently announced, triumphantly, that his license had been granted and we told him, as we did previously, that this would hasten our seemingly inevitable decline as a business.

People seem to think we are part of some international chain when, in fact, the reality is that we are a small independent business, into which we have ploughed our life savings as a semi-retirement project, with all the risk and reward on our ageing shoulders. Our margins are wafer-thin at the best of times but, despite this, we still love being a small part of the Worcester business community.

We pay a flat fee each month in order to trade as ‘Mr Simms.’ We are unable to move our business online as the new owners of the Mr Simms brand from Hong Kong forbid it, and actually market sweets in our area from their own shiny, new website (which they launched at exactly the moment their own High Street franchisees had to go into lockdown).

So, it is true that we are feeling squeezed but we had not expected Worcester News to run a story – without our knowledge or consent – in which they took elements of our formal objection and prevented them as quotes from Michelle and I. Nothing was inaccurate but nothing was agreed with them in advance either, and we were not asked for permission to use such quotes in their story nor even given the opportunity to comment. Is lazy journalism merely a cover for some other ice cream war that we don’t know about? Just to be clear: we only sell Strawberry Kisses, not the Glaswegian variety.

Many people jumped to their own conclusions about this – as some of you will have done here.

We have no problem with competition at all – we regularly tweet about and welcomed our neighbours - House of Coffee - back to the High Street, even though they sell cold drinks, as we do.

We opened, fully aware that Hotel Chocolat already had a store just down from us (though actually it pays dividends hearing people with very thick Black Country accents pronouncing their brand name in a distinctly non-French style!)

Wilko (almost directly opposite our shop) provides pick n’ mix sweets as well as cold drinks, but we remain on very good terms, providing their staff with free packets of sweets during lockdown when we came in to the shop to prepare deliveries (which people were hugely grateful for) and, subsequently, slush cups to cool them down, rather than trying to hide away from the fact that we are all trying to make honest livings.

So, instead of crying over spilled milk bottles, we are looking forward to a little girl’s birthday party in the shop next Friday, and our ‘blind tasting’ session outside the shop the week after, as part of Worcester Festival.

I suppose what is missing in all of the heat this week is common courtesy - or maybe we live in a fantasy world, not unlike the author of that opening quote: Walt Disney.

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6/8/2020 0 Comments

Do you remember Victory V’s, those small liquorice-flavoured lozenges that pack a big punch? If not, you’d probably have been in good company in the mid-nineteenth century when they were sold as medicinal sweets containing a curious ingredient called chlorodyne, which itself was a mixture of chloroform, tincture of cannabis and laudanum. When you woke up, that whole experience would probably have been nothing much more than a technicolour dream in Victorian monochrome…

We still sell quite a few of these sweets in the shop and I was looking at them this morning, thinking about all those memorable battles in which we have come together as a country and won – often against overwhelming odds. It feels a bit like that at the moment doesn’t it? The main difference being that we are fighting a silent and invisible enemy (poetically, a sort of ‘Trumpinverse’), but the main similarity being that we are all in this together, for the duration.

I read with great interest that Theresa May’s husband was understandably to be given a knighthood for, well, being married to Theresa May. Jo Johnson - who few ordinary people like me had ever heard of (I actually thought he used to be a snooker player from Bradford) – for some reason becomes a lord. For Michelle and I our long hours will always be rewarded with cups of tea; thankfully we sell tea in the shop so are unlikely to run out of either tea or sympathy. As I say, we are all in this together.

I must be feeling a bit nostalgic at the moment – possibly due to my love of history or working with a retro brand – but do you remember Green Shield Stamps? I recall, at the ripe old age of about five or six, urging my Dad to stop at the garage so that we could get yet another rewards roll. I hadn’t quite understood that you had to pay money first and, this being the mid ‘sixties, had to then patiently sit and wait while he attempted to fill the car with exactly the right amount of pounds, shillings and pence he had in his pocket, not to mention petrol.

We offer rewards in our shop too – smiles, jokes and lots of laughs – and usually have offers in-store. Currently we are offering two boxes of Bonds liqueurs for £5.00 as opposed to £3.99 each. Our Facebook page (www.facebook.com/MrSimmsWorcester) is the place to go for news of all our latest deals.

We sell gift vouchers too, so if you fancy giving someone a £5 or £10 or £395 gift, do ask us and we’ll happily oblige. A gentleman came in over the weekend with one such voucher from November 2018. In these troubled times that almost seems like pre-history doesn’t it? After quizzing him about the cave in the Malvern Hills he must surely have been living in, we established that he had forgotten all about it (we won’t tell his wife) and it had been through several revolutions in the wash.

On such small events, the great history of our sweet world turns.

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I am a writer and historian with a passion for sweets and football (not necessarily in that order!). I write fiction and non-fiction and, after working in the media for over 30 years, now run a sweet shop with my wife, Michelle, trading as Mr Simms Worcester. I also write about the history of sweets in a series of blog posts: 'A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Sweet Shop.'

Our shop is situated on the corner of Worcester's High Street and Fish Street - hence the title of this blog. I will be writing a weekly piece on thoughts and developments both in the world of sweets, the High Street and Worcestershire in general. All thoughts are my own.

YOUR CART

A view from the corner shop

Sweet experiences for young and old

Flashes of white spirits?

After the heat, the cold slight of day

Victories, these

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