Small Shops, Local Lives

I bought a brush cutter the other week. One of those petrol-driven machines for hacking down long grass. I got it from the ironmongers next to Delia’s Chinese Bazaar in Pinoso, and, while I was there, I plucked up the courage to ask about a very homemade-looking pine wood object that I had noticed on a previous visit.

“It’s for splitting olives,” I was told.

I know very little about the family who own and run the shop. There was an older man, a woman and a younger man, all of uncertain age, although two of them may have been a couple, as well as a very young girl. I guessed at three generations, but who knows? It was the younger man who unpacked the brush cutter and put fuel in it, just to check that everything worked. He gave me a demonstration of how to start it. I suspect I wouldn’t have received quite the same level of attention at the Leroy Merlin DIY megastore. I’m also fairly sure they wouldn’t have had a machine for splitting olives.

I suppose things have changed everywhere in the twenty-plus years we've been in Pinoso but, then, there were small, family-run shops on most streets. The lamps that still hang from our ceiling came from a lighting shop on the corner of the market square. Next door was a shop selling material and clothes, with a window display that always included some traditional clothing: those multi-coloured pleated skirts made from enormous circles of material that are such standard fiesta wear, embroidered shawls and all the accessories women needed to put their hair up in the traditional Pinoso style. It also catered for men. Several times I wondered if I could see any reason at all for buying one of the remarkably fancy silk waistcoats. Come to think of it, there were several more shops on the market square, very few of which still remain.

If you’ve ever been to Pinoso’s Villazgo, the event celebrating the independence of the town, you’ll know that the typical men’s attire is a baggy black smock. I bought one during our first year here. I have never worn it, but it remains in the wardrobe, along with the equally classical blue neckerchief. I bought them from Juanjo’s “perfumery and drugstore” when Juanjo was still alive. He once showed me a letter from Winston Churchill—something to do with the Pinoso coat of arms. His daughters still run the shop, although it has changed from being an Aladdin’s cave of oddities into a self-service perfumería y droguería.

For a while, I worked in a shop in Pinoso that was run by Britons and is now the cafeteria called Ezra’s. It was primarily a furniture shop, but it also offered interior-design services. The woman who owned it, Julie, would often send me out to buy this or that. One of my regular destinations was a haberdashery run by Felipa. Entering Felipa’s shop was always an experience. For one thing, in the days when there were only two sexes, I was the wrong one. I would have to ask, in my faltering Spanish, for several metres of ribbon or some press studs, while a group of women lounged around the counter beside the fetching displays of corsets and big knickers, catching up on the latest town gossip. They eyed me with a certain caution

I was also sent to Pistoleta’s for glazing jobs. He had a workshop at the bottom of Calle Seis de Enero, and could apparently do almost anything with glass. On one occasion, I took him a fragment of an engraved mirror with bevelled edges from an antique wardrobe. Working from the sample and my measurements, he produced a replacement that looked as though it had been made in the late nineteenth century. When he died, his son took over the workshop, but it was never quite the same.

There were bookshops, newsagents, clothes shops, travel agents, ironmongers, grocers, greengrocers, butchers and bread shops. Some still survive, and others have appeared and disappeared over the years, including businesses run by foreigners, such as the furniture shop where I worked. But the small shops are gradually vanishing, particularly as their owners retire and there is nobody to take over.

The internet has done for many of them, of course. The three large Chinese shops now in the town are often the first port of call for the things that might once have been bought from different specialist shops: the lamps from one, the buttons from another and the slippers from a third. Convenience—and perhaps a lack of options—has replaced some of the old variety.

Even so, Pinoso still does reasonably well for shops. You may not be able to find absolutely everything in the businesses that remain, but they can still supply most of what you need from day to day. Even if you need a little device for removing the “bones” from olives.