What you pick up in a Vintage store

Yesterday I got stuck in a vintage shop for 45 minutes. Trapped unable to leave...

You see it was a sunny day in London, and by sunny I don't just mean not raining or light grey, but proper, sunny, yellow, glowing, light, emanating from that gorgeous orb in the sky. I have been putting off a trip down to my favourite vintage shop for a while now, because it's been wet and windy, but yesterday by some miracle the clouds cleared and I made it. And thank god because I needed to go and find a little something for my favourite vegan, as some of my people are leaving for SA tomorrow and I want to send a little care package.

The shop is called Radio Days (Slogan - tune into nostalgia at Radio Days :), its been open for 17 years and sells a variety of artefacts from the 1920s - 1970s. You arrive into a room decorated in various degrees of our recent consumer past. Old telephones in a menagerie of colours are shuffled onto shelves, ancient vanity cases, their insides pale with spilt powder, overflow with scarves from the past. Polystyrene heads haughtily hold up hats, glasses line shelves gleaming through their faint veil of dust. There are boxes of long forgotten postcards, addressed to long forgotten friends, from destinations that were once in vogue.

Being of a magpie-ish nature I am never quite sure where to look first in this veritable treasure trove, but todays it's quite simple. For I have interrupted one of life's perfectly orchestrated 'meet-cutes'. Behind the counter is a pretty, unusual girl with marmalade hair, in captivated conversation with the tall wearer of a mac. I feel the awkwardness of having stumbled upon a moment of inadvertant intimacy, and, realising that this intrusion was most uninvited, I retreat to the back room to intoxicate myself with mothballs and the fashions of former eras. The shop, however, is small, and their conversation irresistable. I can see him now - a straight Rupert Everett. She is open and friendly with a vague Dutch accent, he endearingly self depricating in that English way. He was an archeology student, and is now a struggling actor. She works here but really she's a set designer. He has a beautiful voice; she lives with a voice coach. He lives in Brixton...and she lives in Brixton. She lives in the pink house, he lives four houses away. She can't believe he hasn't seen her riding her bike with the big basket on the front. He rides a bike - it's outside. And so on and so forth.

I continue to lurk in the shadows, slowly flipping through decades of shirts, shifts, shoes and shoulder pads. She giggles, he laughs. He is buying glasses; she swaddles them in so much bubble wrap they can barely fit in the bag. He says he would hate them to be broken by the time he gets home; she wraps them in yet another layer. He says if they survive the bike ride perhaps she would have a drink with him. She laughs again. She says that they get these kinds of glasses often, maybe he would like her to keep some aside for him. He gives her his card.

I sigh. I am late back from lunch, I need a wee, and I found my treasure twenty minutes ago, but now I can safely escape the time warped back room. He leaves, looking over his shoulder. I come to the counter. She is shaking her head in disbelief, "Amazing...we have so much in common, we live so close, and yet we meet here...Amazing..." I say, "Some things are meant to be". She laughs once more, and looks down at her shoes; her face flaming like her hair - so self-conscious to be caught hoping.