Adventures of an Idiot – occasional ramblings of a photography freak

I suppose really these pics should have been included in the Bedford High Street batch I uploaded to Flickr the other day (see this post)… and they would have been, had they been taken then. But they weren’t!
I did in fact take some pics of this shop during that session but they were… well… not to put too fine a point on it, absolute crap.

These, however, are a different matter entirely.

The shop in question (or in the viewfinder) is Harrison & Simmonds, a one-time specialist tobacconists along Bedford’s High Street, and it also happens to be one of my favourite town centre shops. Not least because of the superb and friendly service there.
I’ve been one of their customers ever since I’ve lived in the area (since about 1990) and not once have I ever found fault with them… and I can be a fairly awkward customer if I put my mind to it!
Its certainly not the cheapest tobacconist in town but then I really don’t mind paying a few pennies more when the service is so superlative.

Anyway, yesterday (21st May) was apparently the shop’s 80th anniversary, and it just happened to coincide with my weekly shopping trip into town. Which meant of course that I had to stock up on smoking supplies.
And this particular set of pics came about as the result of a sort of semi-invitation (on their part) and semi-suggestion (on mine).

Of course, with the massive anti-smoking campaign that’s been conducted over perhaps the past couple of decades (here in the UK at least), H&S have found it increasingly difficult to survive and thus have had to diversify somewhat… consequently their current tobacco-related products probably constitute less than a quarter of their stock lines.

Shame, really.