A couple of weeks ago, I read about the closure of Ebrahim Supermarket and I must admit I felt a twinge of sadness. This was one of the two supermarkets – the other being Uchumi – that I have known all my life and I have vivid memories of accompanying my mother there often.

Supermarkets back then were nothing like what we have today. For one, there was nothing intimidating about their size. I’ve said before that the bigger the shop is, the more time I am likely to spend inside it just trying to locate the few items I need, and therefore the more I am inclined to avoid it, not to mention that I end up spending more time parking and going through security checks than inside the supermarket.

In those days, you could count the number of aisles on the fingers of one hand and still have fingers left! Most of the items on the shelves were locally manufactured in addition to having a limited variety of goods, which meant you were likely to find the same stuff in all of your friends’ homes. Those were the days when everybody drank Tree Top, which was the most popular (it really didn’t have much competition) orange squash, cooked with Kimbo or Cowboy cooking fat, which were packaged in metal containers (the more fat you used in your food, the tastier it was!) and spread Blue Band margarine on their bread.

Since this is a trip down memory lane, remember Cadbury’s Drinking Chocolate (When it’s hot, drink it cold; when it’s cold, drink it hot!) and Bournvita, which also came in tins? What about Vaseline Hair Tonic (If you want to be a success, start at the top) and Hair Glo (Hair Glo styles make other heads turn!)? Or Princess Patra and Ambi skin creams, and Susie Martins, the face of Lux beauty soap? I could go on and on but let me stop there.

The size of the shops back then meant that shopping was easy and quick. This was also possible because there were hardly any queues at the cashier’s till. On some days, Mum would pick me up from school then drive into town so she could pick a few items from Ebrahim’s. That was a time when work officially ended at 4.30pm (is that even remotely possible today?) so we went home together every week day. School transport was rare if not non-existent.

No kanjo

Parking in town was never a problem and ‘kanjo’ parking officials were unheard of – you simply fed coins into the parking meter depending on the duration of your stay and went about your business confident that you would not return to find rusty steel jaws threatening your front tyre. If Mum was just dashing into the shop for one or two items, she would leave me in the car (today such a thing would qualify as poor parenting) with instructions that if anyone tried to steal me (her words), I should just start crying loudly. But no one ever did.

Swift cops

Speaking of stealing, those were the days when police responded promptly when called and dealt effectively with criminals. When six robbers descended on our home once and cleaned it out, leaving us with only the clothes we were wearing, the police managed to recover and return everything except our treasured black-and-white TV within a matter of hours. They are not called the good old days for nothing.

I remember joining high school as a boarder and shopping at one of the two supermarkets with just Sh400. It’s a good thing the prices were so reasonable then because Mum had six mouths to feed besides her own, and four of those mouths belonged to ravenous teenagers! On the days we had chapati for dinner, for instance, a whole packet of flour would be used because the oldest sibling would consume eight chapatis by himself – four for his pre-dinner snack and four with the accompanying stew.

They say all good things come to an end and l guess the same is true of our great childhood experiences. I can only look back on those simpler days with nostalgia while facing a fast-changing world with hope and determination