STOP PRESS: September update: bumped into the owner, emerging from his closed-down shop. He confirmed the worst: "tough economics, just couldn't compete with Tesco and Lidl"
Behind the newspaper-covered windows of this nondescript shop - who said the printed press was dead? - was baked the finest bread I have tasted in any of the five continents I have visited.
It was a granary cob, a round loaf with a wonderful crust, and cost just 90p.
Forgive me for an outbreak of parochialism but when I left for France in March, the shop seemed in perfectly good order.
Nicky's Shop, as my granddaughter called it as she waved on the way to school (it was enough for me to indicate with fingers how many loaves I'd pick up on the way back), had a brisk trade in its various breads but also hot and cold snacks and drinks for passing schoolboys, men working on building sites locally and people on their way to work.
At least one other customer, French, swore by the granary cobs, too. And now their maker is either baking them somewhere else or unemployed. I have no word, either, of Nicky, the ever-cheerful manageress.
I have bemoaned, in the past, the role I suspect the London Borough of Ealing - once known as the queen of suburbs - of playing in the steady dismantlement of balanced commercial life. Each time I return, more shops have been boarded up, become Indian takeaways or switched to temporary use as charity stores.
The council, on the face of it, does little to stop the decline. It has a ferocious and sometimes irrational - except in revenue-building terms - parking control operation which severely affects small shops' hopes of securing passing custom.
But I cannot say for sure that this has anything to do with the baker's closure, an event that was, to me, without warning.
Outside Ealing, indeed beyond a small part of Ealing, few people will be too bothered. As a barber told me, the continual process of failing businesses is simply a consequence of the lingering rigours of the crisis we're told is over.
"They say things are getting better," he said, "but the reality is people are still feeling the pinch." Along the same little parade as the baker, a newsagent's shop is still shuttered, the owners having given up the ghost last year. Across the road, the Ealing Cookers store is newly empty though other premises are intriguingly "under offer".
How sad though, whatever the cause, that Nicky and her shop have gone, along with that granary cob, discarded as easily as the paper you see littering the pedestrian crossing.
Stop Press: maybe too early to salivate but my Nicky could be Nikki and today I passed what looked like a soon-to-open shop, Nikki's Baking, a couple of miles away in Chiswick. Hardly convenient for a daily fix but I shall check it out when next visiting these shores
The forlorn shot is not the only picture I have taken during this return to the UK.
This less than friendly character was seen on a visit to London Zoo.
I have whinged before about the cost of (Gran)Daddy Taking Us to the Zoo Today. See this from September 2011: http://www.francesalut.com/2011/09/london-zoo-rip-off-in-a-good-cause-.html.
This time, I was relieved of £65 for two adults and a nipper of five, all qualifying for age concessions. A whacking price to pay and the zoo seems to be light on the usual stars just now; we may have been unfortunate but saw a solitary tiger, a couple of lionesses and no elephants. The grounds, as ever, were in superb shape, and the feeding of the penguins entertained a good-sized crowd.
"Fairly typical of the cost of other London attractions," said the young cashier as he collected our entrance fees. "I hope they at least pay you well out of it," I said. "They do," he replied.
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