Change round in the shops

Well, it's official - the Oriental Rug and Textile Shop is closing, after 20 years of trading. The owner is retiring. The shop itself is on that odd bit of road just down from Monica's clothes shop and round the corner from Lion Antiques. It's an odd little building, sort of squished into a corner. His closing down sale starts on Feb 9th, and he invites everyone to "come along and haggle!"

Meanwhile Mark Westwood, who specialises in scientific books, is rumoured to have sold his shop to Andy Cooke. (I heard this from Mary Fellowes, so it must be true! Mary knows everything that goes on in Hay.) Andy used to run The Bookshop, on the corner of the Pavement by the chemist's, until he fell out with his partners. Then he turned up at the Book Warehouse on Forest Road, and now it seems he wants his own shop again. I used to help with Followers, a sort of Sunday School but on Tuesday afternoons, run by the vicar in the hall next to the school. Andy Cooke's two sons went to Llanigon School at the time and were regulars at Followers.

In Backfold the Bone China Tea Room has a For Sale sign up, too. It, and the little flat above, are being sold off. One of the more colourful characters who used the flat was a Tarot card reader and Fortune Teller, quite a jolly man with a bristling beard, who went on at length about the "good vibes" in the building. He was obviously unaware that it was built on the site of an old slaughter house, where a local butcher in the 1930s committed suicide with a shotgun. (At least he'd had some thought about the clearing up afterwards). The fortune teller disappeared suddenly, leaving his black cat Merlin and a string of debts behind him.
Another tenant was Steve Sage, who had the Sage Bookshop there. His stock was always interesting (I worked for him for a while), but he did tend to fill the shop with cigarette smoke, which tended to put people off.
The shop has been a craft shop at least twice, as well.