The lost shops of Temuka

The last time I was in my old home town of Temuka, the local shoe shop on the main street was closing down. I've never given a damn about shoe stores - some of the most boring times of my life have been spent in them - but I was still sad to see it go, because now I don't think there is a single shop on that main street that is still what it was, back when I lived there as a teenager.

The death of the main street is everywhere in western civilisation - the suburban malls dragged away the customers from the city and town centres, and now the convenience of online shopping has further destroyed the small independent shop.

Temuka is a town of just 3000-4000 people, but the main street used to have loads of good stores, and they're all gone now. Some of them have been totally demolished, most have been repurposed into something else, and a sad amount are just sitting empty, but what is left bears little resemblance to the town I used to live in.

The hardest loss was obviously when Bairds Bookshop closed down, because that was my primary source for comic books for years, during my prime 2000ad and X-Men periods. But even Temuka Stationery, where I got things like the first issue of the Infinity Gauntlet or the adaption of House II: The Second Story, faded away a while ago.

So there's no bookshops, and I also still only see echoes of all the places I used to get my movies from. There is Sullivan and Spillanes, an appliance store where I used to rent video tapes, not because they had a great selection, but because they gave us 50 free hires when we bought our VCR machine from there. Later it was a primary source of the blank cassette tapes I filled with Pink Floyd and Beatles albums. Even later, I went for a job interview there, but I'm still convinced I didn't get the job because a teacher who was friends with the boss was convinced I should go to university. I showed him but not going to university and working in a fat factory so I could afford to buy essential comics like Eclipso: The Darkness Within. I showed him.

That store was full of old crappy furniture for more than a decade after the appliance trade moved out of town, but has now stood empty for ages. Next door, the place I haunted because I couldn't stop looking at the cover of the Dawn of the Dead tape they had (and also did the best hot chips in town), is now a vape store.

There's the shop where I bought Jan Strnad and Gil Kane's Sword of the Atom, and was later a video store where I hired out dozens of films around the turn of the century. It's a real estate office now. Across the road, the first dedicated record and video store in town - and the last, to be honest - has been a pet store for decades now, but I still remember long hours reading the back of vinyl albums to understand lyrics, or going through the horror movie selection on endless Friday nights until we decided to hire out Zombie Flesh Eaters. That place hasn't existed in a long time, but I still remember what it smelled like.

Even great bakeries are now second hand stores, and the old library where I got my first James Bond and Tolkein books from passed into private hands long ago. They're all gone now. Even the shoe shops.

It is certainly something to be expected as you get older, and I can't be the only person who goes back home and sees the ghosts of the past. I'm just not sure so many people see as many echoes of old comic books as I do.