Waitrose to sell food in Boots – Telegraph You’ve probably never heard of Timothy Whites & Taylor. You might be inclined to think it was the name of a firm of country solicitors, auctioneers or estate agents, but you’d be wrong. The name belonged to a national chain of chemists (pharmacies) that came to my hometown of Plymouth in about 1912. My gran shopped there, and sometimes my school mates and I would visit their shop near Drake Circus during our lunch hour. Maybe we thought we could still find laudanum on its shelves. In a cupboard at home we had a bottle of such medicine, next to the aspirin,…

Surprising how one topic seems to dominate a week, isn’t it? I saw this headline in Friday’s globular male the day after responding to a request from LB for a little help with a Latin phrase. This in turn had set me thinking back to my very first lesson in this renascent (RENASCENS -ENTIS), formerly dead, language. The basement rooms at Sutton High School, on Regent Street in Plymouth (England), were dark. The windows gave onto a moat, no doubt intended to let the troglodytic pupils enjoy some daylight in the days of oil lamps and candles when the school was built, but which in late August 1956 barely relieved…