"So did you work down the mines then?"
The question was posed in the Oxfam shop you reach just before passing the closed-down main Post Office - services now transferred to a counter in W H Smith's, for heaven's sake - and the pound stores where proper shops used to be.
I had just chosen, from an interesting window display of books about coalmining, an austere slim volume (it actually calls itself a pamphlet) called Pit Life in Co Durham.
The 60p price tag - I didn't begrudge Oxfam its £4.39 mark-up - should have told me it was a work of more modern history than I had supposed. It may look like something turned out even before the General Strike. In fact, it was published when the miners were on the big "who governs Britain?" strike in 1972.
The decline of coal - and most other traditional industries - would not have been such a shame and a tragedy had alternatives been in place to absorb the human fallout.
No, as I assured the Scottish woman serving me at Oxfam, I didn't strictly speaking work down the mines. Though maybe, in a way, I did since my local newspaper used to send a reporter down in the miners' cage for the last shift prior to each colliery closure.
The pitmen of that age - the late 1960s - would insist that under no circumstances would they want their sons to follow them down into the bowels of the earth to dig for coal. Then they wandered off at shift's end to wait, in many cases, for pneumoconiosis to kill them.
The woman at Oxfam identified with their parting thoughts. I think she said her own grandfather, who had gone down the pits at 14, said at the end of it all that he was pleased no child of his had followed in his footsteps.
By and large, those sons didn't have to. There were other jobs. Fast forward to the 1980s and Arthur Scargill was leading (badly) his men on a no-hope strike to keep pits open. There were no other jobs by then, or not nearly enough. The manner of the destruction of the industry brought shame on the Conservatives, but the destruction itself was something to be welcomed.
What has all that to do with the shabby decline of once-elegant Ealing?
Just that the people of this sheltered corner of west London are now beginning to experience, and if they are not they may well do, the sort of thing that was commonplace in the North, South Wales and Scotland, along with other areas of a de-industrialised nation.
I do not like the way Britain is going, but I fear it is going there all the same.
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