From Highgrove to High Street and one’s very own corner shop
Wednesday morning in the ancient Cotswold market town of Tetbury. Outside the Snooty Fox hotel a man is pinning up the lunch menu. Fluffy week-old chicks – a surprisingly rural Easter display in the window of Hairdressing Creative – stumble around beneath a light bulb wondering what the hell’s going on. In a gloomy recess of Tetbury Old Books, Philip Gibbons sits in his armchair waiting for his first customer.
But Tetbury High Street is not quite itself this morning, nor perhaps will it ever be again. For on Tuesday, Prince Charles, who lives a few miles outside town, opened a shop. Yes, Charles Philip Arthur George Windsor has gone into retail.
It’s a gift shop and grocery store. And although it’s not yet 10am, the shop, called Highgrove, is jampacked, with more people outside trying to get in. Cotswold ladies have forsaken their Agas in droves to hurry over and cast a critical and heavily madeup eye over the merchandise and, above all, to get their hands on a Highgrove carrier bag.
I write the Low Life column, about life as a pauper, for the Spectator magazine. Living it up for me is a lunch of a can of Heinz Big Soup and a bag of crisps. As I push open the pastel green door and barge my way into the shop, I can almost feel the shock of the Aga brigade – I’m just not their sort.
