W is for Window Dressing!

Not least than because it sat around the half-centennial of a certain 'small step'; the theme for this year's Fleet Carnival's retail window-display competition was 'Space', and if you want a reason for the demise of the High Street - among all the others - this post will illustrate one: complacent disinterest in saving themselves; a problem currently affecting the wider populace - worldwide!

Serendipity is one of the multi-room/corridor display-cabinet, shared-space managed antique and collectables 'arcades', and one of the exhibitors - having distinctly non-antique modern toys - provided the bulk of the display, consequently it's full of interesting stuff for toy collectors to see, but seemed to be a bit 'easy'!

A close-up of the two characters closest to this Blog's heart - not! But nice to see it in this condition with Jabba's squeezey-cocktail tube & tap, the little squeaker and such like!

The party and balloon shop; Party Boutique, not a chain but an independent business, went with space-related stock, which is fair and expectable, but again, for me not a winning strategy as - again - it's too easy?

Captured Moment is one of the local photo-shops, and again an independent (the chain, up the road about 25-doors didn't enter!), went with what I suspect are kid-made Luna-rovers and a few blow-ups of planets and things.

The rocket is a blow-up, but has been constructed into a 3-D object in the corner there. The craft element gives this one an edge.

Yeah! 'Fire-up the photocopier and see what happens!'. Seriously guy's & girls; next year either make an effort or don't bother at all!

Two of the charity shops had a go, Blue Cross got theirs up first and have - if nothing else - ended up with an eclectic collection of whatever they had as space-related stock, presumably 'at the moment', but possibly they had had a few weeks or months notice of the theme and had squirreled-away a few bits? As far as this post goes; it's the best for what can you find?

Like the balloon-shop, the haberdashers Sew Busy (geddit!) went with their own subject-relative stock, but stock which had to have more work done to it than just being blown-up or taped to the window, as a consequence there is a lot of effort involved in this window, and some fun stuff to spot.

Things have been sewn, glued or brought together with a design-bent, although it has a bunch of balloons as well! I'm not sure how a Clangers astronomy set got into the window, or the shop, but you can't really beat a Clanger 'thing', except maybe with a Womble thing!

The other charity shop to enter (from a total of seven!) left it 'till the night before, and followed the lead of Blue Cross, to the same effect - I love the silver slipeprs, for some reason it makes me think of Junior School productions of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat!

Now, again a bit of a rant-opportunity here! Hopefully the idiots' have got bored and gawn-orff, so it's only those of you who've read this far hoping to see if there's an ulterior motive to this mediocre nonsense, and there is!

Now, I hope the sewing shop won? If it was a staggered prize format, I would further hope the photographer's came second and Blue Cross third. Purely on level of effort involved, with Blue Cross having the best of the others and getting it up several days before the Cancer charity. But each judge to his own, and some may have scored the balloon shop higher?

But the real point to get from this is that it ably shows just why the High Street is in the state it's in. There must be 300+ retail enterprises in Fleet with a display frontage, and seven of them made an effort to enter a competition aimed at engendering interest in the 'retail space'! It's a shocking indictment of the complacency of these people, no wonder they keep going bust, they're not willing to save themselves!

If a hundred of them had had a stab, there would have been a real hype about the thing; you may have got the local telly-news down for the day? Certainly local radio is always looking for decent output which isn't depressing crime and local authority failure. You may have got more kids from the surrounding villages badgering their parent to '...go to Fleet and look at the space windows?' instead, the whole thing was over in less than seven days and for five of those only had six entrants!

Jabba the Hutt and lazy retailer's - in the one Blog post - fancy that!