Bournemouth RIP

I went to the little Eurochange currency shop in Bournemouth this week. I needed some Thai bahts. Alas, like most of the shops on that stretch of the town centre, it’s shut down. Although it turned out that Eurochange is closed because there was a fire in the flats above the shop. Some, probably most, of the several thousand gallons of water lobbed into the building by the fire brigade made its way to ground level. Unfortunate, but it’s another nail in the coffin of Bournemouth as a retail centre. 

I could write a long piece about the decline of Bournemouth, but a chap called Peter Viney has already produced an exceedingly thorough account of the towns travails, so I won’t bother. I’ll just add that’s it got worse since his last update. Fat Face is also now gone. Starbucks in the Triangle too. Starbucks!! When coffee shops up-sticks and off-bugger….well, that is the retail equivalent of a fat lady singing, isn’t it? And Specsavers closed its doors for the last time on Christmas Eve. Which is jolly annoying, because that was my opticians and it was very conveniently located for me. 

The only thing Peter and I would disagree upon, I suspect, is how bad things are. He says ‘decline’. I say ‘deceased’. Large parts of it, anyway. It’ll remain a viable entertainment destination, but large stretches of the town (especially a lot of Old Christchurch Road and Westover Road) would be best returned to housing stock. The buildings are actually rather fabulous. They just need ground-floor front doors and a lick of paint.

There’s a whole bunch of reasons why it’s gotten to this stage. Online shopping. Business rates. Ridiculously expensive car parking. Castle Point shopping centre is better and easier to get too. Marauding teenagers with knives and skateboards. Drunks, druggies and the homeless encampments set up in every other shop doorway. Litter and graffiti everywhere. And peoples eyes are getting better. 

Maybe the last point is controversial. I don’t know. But my last eye test was back in the autumn. I strolled through the doors of Specsavers, had machines scan the back of my eyeballs, puffs of air were blown into them, I read bits of text out until I couldn’t, and then I awaited the verdict. The verdict was, my eyes are getting better. Much better!  They’re back to what they were about five years ago. The optician gave me a new prescription. I thanked him, walked straight past the walls of spectacles on display, went home and fished around in my draw of old glasses for the ones I was wearing about five years ago. Job done. 

It’s a crappy business model, telling people their eyes are getting better. Not conducive to staying in business. Almost definitely why my Specsavers shut up shop. Probably. But I’d had a hunch my eyesight had changed. I only really wear glasses for driving or when I’m at the theatre or cinema. In the summer, we rented a car in Mexico and I realised that my glasses weren’t really making much difference. I could see fine without them. So I stopped wearing them. I haven’t needed to put them on since, except when driving at night.

I will say that I do seem to need to wear my reading glasses more. So it is possible that my eyes aren’t getting better. They’re just getting worse in the other direction…..