NORIDEL GONE

You may or may not remember a series of posting from the early days of this blog about a battered little shop bearing the name “Noridel Zeus”. In those early days, when I was rather desperate to think of anything at all that I could write about, (as opposed to now when I’m trying to come up with myriad reasons to stop…), I wrote a fair few short pieces – with a little help from my friend Rick - about that intriguingly named and crumbling little retail outlet, mostly because the unusual name had been catching my eye for several years as I drove past it every day as I drove to work.

That was all two-and-a-half years ago now, and I’d all but forgotten about them, but they suddenly popped into my consciousness again when someone posted a comment about one of those very postings (after all that time, which only goes to prove something or other about blogging…) and engaged me in a little nostalgic exchange of comments about the old place, which has, rather sadly, been decaying still further since those heady, optimistic days when I believed that my words actually might mean something to somebody one day.

If you want to have a look at what I was thinking back then, by the way, just type “Noridel Zeus” into your search engine of choice, and at least one of my humble offerings will pop up. You’ll probably find very similar thoughts to these, only I suspect that they might have been better written back in those days before the cynicism set in too deeply.

I’d passed by that little shop for years, and, one day, I decided to stop and take a few pictures because I believed that the day would finally come when an old and battered row of buildings like that might be bought by a developer and bulldozed into history, and I’d better have some sort of photographic record, because I honestly thought that nobody would ever believe me when I told them about the unusual name that was once painted so proudly above the door which seemed to come from another era, or perhaps even the pages of Charles Dickens.

I also wanted to have it as a memory trigger if I was ever stuck for a character’s name in a play, because I also used to believe that I was something of a playwright back in those days, too.

Well, I have to report that a rather sad day has come… The signs have disappeared, even if the shop itself has not quite fallen down yet. They have been stripped away from that battered façade, and are gone. I did wonder whether it was the gales last weekend which had finally done for them, although I’m pretty sure that I’d subliminally noticed they’d disappeared a few days earlier, and my searches on the internet revealed a few photographs which seemed to imply that it had actually happened some little while ago, and that I was simply not paying attention.

Still, as we are now skating towards the one thousandth blog mark, which does have a slight feeling of being enough of a landmark to perhaps finish at, even though it’s still a good few weeks off, I suppose it’s rather appropriate to revisit one of my more successful postings from those early days and give anyone who might have wanted it some kind of closure.

I wonder what became of those signs…? Did they just blow away on one gusty night, or were they perhaps stolen by a fan of strange and unusual ephemera…? Perhaps they were just torn off by vandals, or the shop owner is planning a refurbishment but liked the eccentric nature of those old shop signs…?

Maybe old Noridel himself returned and spirited away his own name, leaving nothing but an enigma wrapped up in a mystery and sealed inside a conundrum, and just the vaguest of memories of a name which might have been, but about which I’m not longer even certain about myself.

Farewell then, Noridel Zeus old son, and thanks for all the inspirational nostalgia you’ve triggered in me over the years.

I just hope that they didn’t end up in a skip, that’s all.