Waitrose to sell food in Boots – Telegraph

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, phial of iodine, bottles of olive oil and brandy and lovage that were the mainstays of our medicine chest. It looked something like the old Timothy Whites & Taylor bottle shown here. Ours was very old, too, and contained opium and alcohol in the guise of a stomach medicine. I think gran had kept it after my grandad’s death from cancer in 1949, although it was probably bought long before then. When it was eventually thrown out, I was relieved nobody had died for want of the medicine I had been furtively filching during my childhood.

Because our family usually shopped at Timothy Whites instead of Boots the Chemist, we had a standing joke in our house. It was one of the earliest I recall, and was always met with gales of laughter. Now, you have to remember that we didn’t have indoor toilets when I was a boy, so we were still using chamber pots (or pots, as we called them, using the French pronunciation). Having filled in the background, I’ll risk telling you the joke.

‘Gran went to Timothy Whites the other day to buy a new pot, but they didn’t have any.’

‘Did she try Boots?’

‘Yes, but her pee ran out of the lace holes.’

Hardly cracks you up nowadays, does it?

So it must be all of 40 years ago that Boots bought up Timothy Whites & Taylor, and the name disappeared. Now I see in the Telegraph that you are soon going to be able to buy groceries in Boots. Inevitably, I suppose. They’ve had beverages and sarnies for a long time, and they didn’t run out of the lace holes.

But where have all the chamber pots gone? Not to mention the laudanum.

Où sont les neiges d’antan?