What’s at the Window: The PC Box and Lego Shop

I thought I’d write a little about a Computer Shop on a side road in the city, with its prominent Lego you can see from the street. I must have passed it by a hundred times, coming in, coming out, mostly in the evening or at night. It took me a while even to realise what the place was.

This store has its rocket launch, Discovery Moon Lander. Bolt shaped flowers and cutlery shaped into hedgehogs and birds.

It’s a PC shop, boxes placed in between these little displays. Functional and uniform, dark rectangular images with each retro device. And I feel people are drawn because of the visual. It’s a waypoint for where you are in the city. Myself and others know it, much like the pub nearby when you throw it in conversation. Not because of what it sells, but how it looks.

What was made up, what makes it stand out. Like all art, all curiosities it’s building a little something to catch the eye, which catches the attention; and I believe that all comes from deep human curiosity.

I can see in my mind’s eye that corner, those vehicles and kits stood to a third of my height. I know the door is always open, and those windows never closed. It has an organic quality no commercial gallery or ‘event’ can possess. It’s not temporary. Been like that for a dozen years, hopefully more. Personality in the tiny aesthetics, with the little things we make in this life.

The placement of a hobby takes precedent to our wandering minds. I listened to someone say we should stop to look through the window, and made time to consider what was being sold, the window always open. there was marketing, good use of display, but without a hint of company calculation. It was someone or a group of people making their hobbies and creativity something productive, something done purely for beauty’s sake. Something to share. And now, it’s echoed out in a different way.

Some of you have seen it in person perhaps, but those who have not may know a place like it. Or their own curio. Everything almost insignificant, each visual waypoint in a place that’s unmoored by time.

We can make our own windows, projects, places reflections of our tastes, decorations that are not merely decor. We can think and get a great deal from the littlest thing, find sense in bolts and sheets of metal and bright bricks put into three dimensional shapes.

I like thinking about that window, and as the article comes to an end, so does the experiment of bringing it to your mind’s eye.