Shopkeepers in Mugla, thinking about corpocracy

I find shopping in England to be a bland, uneventful, affair - I can remember the shops I went to as a boy - they were fascinating, scary, dens - the ironmongers was a dark cave - a thin man in a long brown coat weighed out gleaming bolts - there was a smell of paraffin and oil - I could have stayed there for hours, looking at the small boxes of nails, the cruel chisels - in the butchers, brawny young men heaved pig carcasses into the cold store - shops were places where I marvelled, catching sight of a strange world -

I find no marvels in the airship hangers of Tesco or PC World - I can only sense the workings of corpocracy -

But in Mugla, I felt as though I had stolen back into my boyhood - there they were, the small, magical, shops - they were arranged by trade, or type - so I walked past a row of shops, selling song birds - the tiny feathered divas were imprisoned in elegant cages - then, I might walk past a row of shoe shops, or skirt lairs where carpets and kilims were offered to the unwary -

The shopkeepers, like weary milords, might sit outside their shops, basking in the sun - they would stare at the sluggish workmen, digging up the narrow street -

Anne told me how she went to buy a pair of scissors - three boys surged forward, demonstrating different types of scissors - they cut up lengths of paper, so as to show the sharpness of the blades -

These shopkeepers, I thought, were following a calling - they were not yet servers -

I'd just read Cloud Atlas a few weeks before - my heart was still rent with indignation -