Woolies then is no more. Age withered him and lack of custom staled his infinite variety. (OK, I am fully aware of the fact that the Shakespearean allusion is of Cleopatra, but I simply can not refer to Woolie’s as a ‘her’. God only knows why, but that’s the way it is.)

     Il est more. More than 30,000 jobs gone at the stroke of an insolvency practitioner’s pen. Little hope for the long serving job holders destined to become long serving job seekers. Enter now, those two famous residents of the tiny Isle of Sark – the Barclay Brothers – to save the day. They announce, or rather their spokesman with a double-barrel surname does, that they have purchased ‘Brand Woolworth’. Not the business, just the name. The spokesman cheerfully chirps that the Woolworth’s name and all it stood for has been saved forever, for posterity, for our children and for our children’s children. Woolie’s is to retail solely online. Will they be re-employing ex-staff he is asked. No is the curt reply and then a fast monologue into the fabulous wonders of the new website. Click, click – what a dick.

     The Barclay Brothers have a history of riding into desperate dying companies on their white chargers. They see themselves as the saviours of failing business enterprises: not so very long ago we would have more pertinently referred to them as ‘asset-strippers’. They ‘saved’ the Littlewoods retail empire from bankruptcy a few years ago. They shut down all the retail stores, changed the name to ShopDirect  and set about the pruning of staffing levels with a characteristic knightly gusto. Littlewoods was an old established Liverpool firm and as such was possibly Merseyside’s biggest employer of local labour. In fairness to the dynamic duo, they did retain many of the Liverpudlian workers by continuing to operate call centres, warehouses and the like in the local area.

     Last week the Barclay Brothers announced, or rather our spokesman friend did, that ShopDirect  was closing all operations down in the Merseyside region. In future the company’s base would be ‘down South’. There would, of course, be job losses due to this essential restructuring, estimated numbers in the order of 3,000 plus…..