NO GOOD SHOP IS EVER SHUT.

DOING BUSINESS IN SUMMERTIME PARIS.

My parents were shopkeepers. I'm a child of retail. Holidays, far from providing a break, were the busiest time for my father, who was a baker. All those office parties and golf club buffets needed canapés, cakes and finger food. My becoming a writer just hammered home the philosophy, making it ineradicable. Christmas, New Year, Thanksgiving – each dawns on the same accusing blank page. If someone arrived and found nobody behind the counter, we could expect a peremptory call of "Shop!"If one sentence is engraved on my soul, it’s “Who’s minding the store?”

This may be why I so enjoy David Lean's film Hobson's Choice, set in a boot and shoe shop in the British midlands. It captures the relentless discipline of shopkeeping, the necessity for someone to always be there when a customer arrives. Charles Laughton can lay down the law to his rebellious younger daughters but it's the oldest, Maggie, who really runs the place, insisting that, when their beaux look to flirt, they don't leave without buying something.

All this is by way of expressing surprise that, returning from a couple of weeks by the ocean, I found most of Paris shut tight. The summer shut-down is, of course, a familar aspect of life here, but at one time being closed didn't mean that nothing was happening. August was the month for renovations. The streets resounded to the clatter of pneumatic drills and the whirl of saws as new counters were installed and the kitchen modernised.

Not so since Covid, however. After a brief spasm of activity following the lifting of  lockdown, Paris shop-keepers seem to have pulled out the plug and turned off the lights. It was noticable even before the start of August. In the preceding week, our local butcher and fromagier halved the amount of meat and cheese on display. "Why keep stock for a month," one explained, "when we can re-stock with fresh in September?" For me, the answer was simple: so that a client - me - could have a gigot for his last Sunday lunch of July and not need to make do with a shoulder of pork (All right, it was tasty - but it's the principle of the thing.)

Now, when I walk down rue de l'Odéon, I pass shop after shop that isn't simply closed but has its window blocked with sheets of paper to keep the sunlight out. The food hall in Marché St Germain is shut until the end of the month, as are most restaurants. Those that are open, such as the venerable Balzar bistro, are half empty - a chastening experience, since competing for a good table during the lunchtime rush has always been part of the fun.

A few evenings ago, the prolific and indefatigable Oliver Gee of Earful Tower eminence dropped in and we spent the evening on our balcony, chatting over a carafe of white as we watched the light fade. He was thinking of joining his wife and child in Sweden but wondered how he could continue to service his busy Facebook site, his self-published series of childrens books, his burgeoning guided tour business, the novel he was thinking of writing. I fidgeted about getting back to the book I had promised to deliver by Thanksgiving and finishing Camus's The Fall for the next Paris Writers Salon. We might be taking off an illicit few hours but business was still on our minds. There was still someone at the counter; waiting for customers; minding the store.