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Donovan, that seeming child of faerie, recently turned eighty. He is still performing and only a week or two ago on social media trumpetingly denounced as "fake news" the possibility of his retiring. At the time of writing his most recent concert was four days ago, in Cork; another, in Galway, is scheduled for October.
I don't think I'll be buying a ticket should he ever venture to England again, but I'm glad I went to see him a few months ago at Richmond Theatre; it felt like a final farewell to one whose music had once meant a great deal to me.
Settling into my (very comfortable) seat an usher handed me a Donovan CD. Possibly this happened to everybody - I was rather late in arriving, so don't know - but for a moment it felt like a "thank you" from the veteran troubadour himself, a way of acknowledging all the cash I must have thrown his way over the years, though later I did entertain the unworthy thought that his merch people might have been trying to offload copies of the less well-known albums which hadn't attracted many buyers in the foyer.
A few years ago in these pages I described my disappointment at a 2004 Dono-concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the first experience to test my Dono-faith, nevermore to resume residence in my heart with the same ardency. As I finished that piece, I found myself being pulled two ways: he had meant so much, even if he was no longer what he had been. Then, still searching for the precise words with which to tie a ribbon neatly around the experience of those long years of fandom, I noticed that his official site had a link to a live concert in Germany ...
Click.
Danish chain Flying Tiger Copenhagen has been based in Croydon's Whitgift Centre for at least seven years, but its store is now labelled as "permanently closed" on Google Maps.
[Daily Express, 28 April 2026]
The above news is, as a friend of mine would put it, "A wee shame." Especially as Croydon's Tiger store is not the only branch of these cheap but inviting stationer's-cum-giftshops to have closed in recent times; I mourn the loss of a North London branch which happily occupied many post-prandial minutes when I was working nearby.
More than a hundred Tiger establishments remain aroar in the UK though it seems that their days might be numbered too: according to a recent report the Flying Tiger company is about to be taken over by the private equity firm which acquired and rebranded WH Smith as TG Jones. That might not be the reprieve it seems: as 150 of those translated Smith's are now at risk of closure that surely doesn't augur well for other acquisitions.
The Croydon branch of Tiger seems to have been particularly popular with its customers, so why did it have to close? According to the Extra London News website it's merely one of many retail casualties, the result of "economic pressures, high business rates, and the post-pandemic e-commerce boom".
True, you can still find shops which stock inexpensive stationery and the sort of small impulse-purchase which Tiger specialises in but for me, at least, they aren't a viable alternative - even if, like Paul Simon, I took (and take) some comfort there.
The blunt fact is that whatever their consolations most of the correspondingly cheap'n'cheerful emporia lack, or lacked, Tiger's style. Wandering into the branch of Wilkinson's (before its contraction) which was situated upstairs from Tiger in that North London mall I remained in a state of painful sobriety, acutely conscious that I was merely frittering away what remained of my lunch hour by looking through cheap tat. The moment I stepped into Tiger, however, its decor and choice of background music was enough to give me, however fleetingly, a kind of spiritual elevation: with Wilkinson's above me only in the literal sense I felt, for a moment,
little lower than the angels
And - to proceed at last to the point of this post - quite apart from their less inspired surroundings, Tiger's rivals never seem to stock the stationery item which I prize above all else: The Modestly-Priced A5 Unlined Notebook.
That's not just any Modestly-Priced A5 Unlined Notebook: I speak of one with thin pages - it's a dealbreaker - so securely sewn in that none of the fleeting thoughts committed to paper can make a break for it and scatter themselves over the runway as a helpless Sterling Hayden looks on.
WH Smith (as was) also used to stock a good 'un too, but you will search for it in vain now - a significant loss for budget-minded scribes, especially if Tiger becomes extinct.
These days the only kind of cheapo notebooks with plain pages to be found in discount stores are aimed at budding artists and come laden with the sort of heavy, rough-toothed paper made to resist curling when a wet paintbrush sloshes all over it. Which is all fine and dandy for the aspiring watercolourist but it does place strict limits on the number of sheets between their covers.
Quantity is the thing: I don't need acid-free, high-quality pages on which to scribble my scrappy ideas; something little more substantial than tissue paper will be perfectly adequate, thank you, so long as the firstlings of my mind can roam free and maybe - who knows? - transform into something else, something good, all within the same one-stop tome.
Forget those attractive Moleskine notebooks, expensive without being expansive: such a dainty product can only accommodate the barest outline of a writer's first thoughts, leaving the rest locked up in a head at risk of the agonising sensations described in Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (an ever-tightening metal contraption around the skull, if I recall aright).
Yes, cheap and plentiful is the way. So why are such items harder to come by these days? Is there some reason for their scarcity which I've overlooked? Could it be that recent generations are so wedded to keyboards that the market for the humble product which has suited me so well has all but vanished?
Not that I am personally in crisis mode. Over the years, I have been - no, not panic buying, because there has been no immediate cause for panic. But whenever particularly amenable items have been spotted on the shelves of stationery shops I have rarely trusted to their being forever in stock.
I will admit that I did once buy up a number of discontinued A5 notebooks from the Covent Garden branch of Paperchase or Scribbler, but that was partly because they were going cheap. It wasn't quite the bargain that I assumed, however. I still have a few as yet unmarked beyond the faintest of tannings but I can't use them. I tell myself I'm saving them for special projects - but the thought provokes a selfconsciousness which makes next to impossible to defile them and so they remain on my shelves.
Surveying the others, stained from start to finish with my inkings and pencillings over the years, I could weep for the time and effort lavished upon some of them: so many projects which never evolved into anything substantial. But I try not to think about the hit ratio too much. However briefly the feeling lasts, each time I buy another notebook it feels like a fresh start and I try to put past failures aside.
Maybe I'll do a crawl of the remaining Tiger shops before it's too late.
*
I quoted briefly from a John Betjeman poem earlier to describe the sensation of shopping in Tiger. For anybody who might be wondering, the title of this piece alludes to another of his works, hymning Croydon and loss:
In a house like that
Your Uncle Dick was born;
Satchel on back he walked to Whitgift
Every weekday morn.
Boys together in Coulsdon woodlands,
Bramble-berried and steep,
He and his pals would look for spadgers
Hidden deep.
The laurels are speckled in Marchmont Avenue
Just as they were before,
But the steps are dusty that still lead up to
Your Uncle Dick’s front door.
Pear and apple in Croydon gardens
Bud and blossom and fall,
But your Uncle Dick has left his Croydon
Once for all.
Two earlier pieces with more about the background music in Tiger shops:
More musings about stationery:
Pentel Man or Blu-Tack Thinking
The soundtrack double album for the fifties-set British film That'll Be the Day was number one on the UK charts today in 1973, or so I have recently been informed on social media. Its featured oldies helped foster a love in me for doo wop and rock'n'roll more generally even though I have never owned a copy. Tracks were played on the radio at the time - Luxembourg as well as Radio 1 - and I still recall the moment I first heard Frankie Lymon hitting a certain note on Why Do Fools Fall in Love.
The modest film, written by Ray Connolly, has endured, probably because it wasn't primarily conceived as a means of shifting records. Quite the reverse, in fact: the soundtrack LP came into being in order to raise the rest of the finance to make the film, as Connolly has said.
[Producer David] Puttnam went to see a small Canadian television marketing company and proposed building our movie around a plethora of old hits they could promote as a tele-marketed compilation album.
They would pump more than £200,000 into an advertising campaign, showing clips from the film, so all we had to do was put together a 40-track soundtrack album of oldies but goldies.
We’d always planned to have some songs in the film, but 40!
