A rather awful thing is due to happen this month: the closure of perhaps the oldest (certainly one of the last) of a kind of small shop which used – before large chain stores – to be all there was. There are still some independent butchers, bakers and greengrocers left on some of our high streets; there are almost none left of the sort of ironmongers which, when the two Ronnies performed their now classic sketch Fork Handles (in which when Ronnie Barker asks for fork ’andles he is given four candles, watch it on YouTube), were the norm.