IN PRAISE OF SHABBINESS

Genteel shabbiness isn’t uniquely English but is without doubt something we’re experts at. Perhaps 1970s London best displayed our genius for this but reading Orwell, Greene or Dickens proves we’ve been masters for centuries. I’d especially recommend descriptions of William Dorrit and his ‘collegians’ in the Marshalsea Prison - or Orwell’s Gordon Comstock, in a second-hand bookshop.

So what trueborn Englishman wasn’t saddened to hear that its best retail exponent - W H Smith - is soon to close? I must pay a final visit (the first in decades) to that frightful one behind Jesus College, on Cornmarket. Perhaps then a meal at a Little Chef or an Aberdeen Steak House, followed by receiving a multi-story carpark mugging? Alas, all gone - the piss-stained Westgate carpark has been replaced by a slick modernist underground job.

Like Boots, Smiths is somewhere you enter then slump into a coma, forgetting what you came for and your very reason for existing. You stagger around the budget airline check-in fittings, falling over piles of Angling Times or Terry’s Chocolate Oranges. Somewhere - out of a teenager’s grubby reach - are the top-shelves of Penthouse and Mayfair. And the staff! Only the English can convey that mix of respectability and imminent disaster. Anyone daft enough to buy something faces the legendary self-service tills, a dishevelled assistant hovering as you do their job for them.

Many will have been amazed Smiths didn’t disappear decades ago. It’s like hearing that Lyons Corner Houses or the Aerated Bread Company are closing down. What other temples to our national shabbiness remain? I think motorway service stations are a wonderful resource, even when full of fast-food joints. The tatty atmosphere, the enormous puddles and promotional tables for the RAC or refugee charities. I’d also draw attention to their desultory amusement arcades.

On that note, any of our collapsing seaside towns - especially in January - are a joy for the dedicated shabbiness detectorist. Hastings New Town is good; St Leonards is world-class. It’s the uneasy and unconvincing mix that matters, the unavoidable suggestion that respectability is losing its battle with decline. Gentrification isn’t necessarily a disaster. The delightful failure of hipster joints is usually presaged by tell-tell signs of shabbiness returning. Anyway, don’t hipsters love ‘shabby chic’?

There’s certainly something ineffably shabby about ‘Sir’ Keir Starmer. It’s his awful voice, naff hair, cheap tetchiness and tick-box managerial panic. I guess in his case it’s moral shabbiness emerging, inexorably - how perfectly he resembles some Dickensian humbug on the make.