How I went to Deal with the digital revolution

This week, I noticed the Kodak shop on Deal High Street had shut for business.  In this digital age, I cannot claim I went there much to support it. I once bought a memory card for a camera and was directed on another visit to select my photographs from a self-service point.  More than a little self-conscious, I found myself as I still do now, longing for a time when you could just hand in a roll of film at the counter.

In the last eighteen months the record shop, The Sound House has disappeared too, a victim of downloads and a conspiracy of cut-throat supermarkets, apparently.  Personally, I really miss the spontaneity of buying music on a whim - from budget big-band CDs to Kraftwerk, from Ray Charles to Richard Burton's wonderful reading of 'Under Milk Wood'. All of which and more were once found there.

Without wishing to sound too sentimental, I miss Tylers, the stationers on the High Street most. Sadly, it appears to have become a gentleman's outfitters for the ageing rave generation but once, not too long ago, it stocked an excellent selection of Winsor & Newton paints, drawing materials and sketch books, something I thought I'd do a lot of when I first moved here.  It had, as far as I know, the only colour photo-copier in the town and, as well as selling Parker pens, printer ink-cartridges and general stationary needs, the shelves supported a fine and dedicated collection of local history books, such as the excellent 'Old Pubs of Deal & Walmer' and Judith Gaunt's 'Shops Remembered...' of which Tylers and the music store are now both sadly consigned.

With Deal's only independent bookshop lost as well, this town is largely left with the discarded tastes of today's Kindle reader and those last-minute, ill-thought gifts (celebrity chefs and once anonymous SAS heroes) now fighting for shelf-space in numerous charity shop windows.  I like the new Library but for me it's always been there and, in retrospect, as much of this post is, it makes me quite proud to live in an area where its public library is open for longer hours and on more days than the local police station. But 'Shhhush!' Don't say it too loud.