Beam Me Up Scottie

When I was a boy, pet shops were strange, slightly alien places with large open sacks of smelly dried this and that lying next door to aquariums full of neon tetras and buckets full of millet strings .
They were totally utilitarian places, that often smelt of leather.....and when you took a second look, there was always some sort of depressed feathered creature asleep on the counter.

That was then.
Now it's all very high tech .....it's gone all Star Trek
Last night Chris and I attended a 'friends and family' open day at a newly opened pet superstore.
We were invited by my twin Janet, who has, after 30 years in the same job, has just moved  careers into the modern day petshop retail sector and given the fact that our combined age is well over 100, the night still felt as though I was going to a school open day.

The pet superstore was a surprise to be sure!
The whole place was totally space age! With rows upon rows of gleaming pet food, a pet grooming centre ,more medications
that you would see in your average hospital pharmacy and squeaky clean miniature hamsters climbing across their rope swings within futuristic aseptic containers, the place looked more like Waitrose than the pet shops I knew from old.

It was nice to be there to support my Sister on her first official opening day... But we needn't have worried....working along side kids just out of their teens , and faced with handling snakes, rats and bearded lizards and a computerised till more complicated than in ITU ventilator  ...she looked as though she had been working there for years.

Off to London later tonight.......meeting up with Nuala..my touchstone