Sunday, May 11, 2003
Rod Rash
Rod Rash
is an anagram for a world-famous corner shop in London. They give you a bloody map when you go through the door in this place. Only tourists walk through the doors, though. I reckon they have a special "Stage Door" type side-entrance for the likes of the Sultan of Brunei and Victoria Beckham to use so they can avoid all the rucksack-esconced plebs. I recently spent a while in there with a couple of colleagues. We were trying to find the pet department. Not that we needed a pet, Ryanair would've charged us the price of a new 737 to bring it back to North Catalonia. It's just that I've always been told that at Rod Rash you can get anything you desire, even an elephant. So we were going to ask how much one was.
In the main lobby they were selling packs of 72 "Tarot" playing cards and as fully-paid up members of the Perpignan Teacher's Tuesday Tarot and Tipple Club™, we didn't buy any. Not at £24 a throw! And need I mention the £24,000 (Yep, £ 24K, bargain) canteen of cutlery? Quite. Nobody actually buys anything from Rod Rash. The only time you see anyone pull out a bit of cash is in the loos, for the immaculately-uniformed keepers of the porcelain bus that hover discreetly while you whistle away. When you have splashed on a bit of YSL after your ablutions, 20p seems a little off the mark somehow. At least I can say I have shopped (well, left some money in the Gents) there now. However, I'm unable to tell you the price of an elephant because when we finally got to Pets, it was closed "...due to high levels of animal stress. We are sure you will understand blah blah". I'm not quite sure on which side of the cages the animal stress was situated so, just in case we were the ones experiencing high stress levels, we went to the in-store pub. Did you know they had one? Oh yes they have, and very nice it is too. Bit pokey though. It's called the Green Man. We would have preferred "White Man" as that was about how you could describe the hue of our cheeks after paying for a round in there.
You can visit London "as if you were there" from the comfort of wherever you have your IAD by going to VRLondon