HAVING SOME BUSINESS to do at Selfridges last week, I
went along thereat half-past four, only to be greeted with the cheerful news that the shop was closed because someone had put a bomb in it, necessitating a thorough search. Next day the same hoaxer, or a similar one, rang Harrods with the same information; in Knightsbridge, how- ever, they are made of sterner stuff (or per- haps they felt that having the place blown to pieces would be a welcome solution to the take-over problem), and had the place searched by house detectives without clear- ing it. These hoaxes, following the spate a few months ago (when railway stations were the chief targets), are annoying, and after all it is possible that one day somebody will actually have planted a bomb. But I think it high time that the farce of closing down the establishment to 'search' it, in the case of somewhere the size of Selfridges or Charing Cross Station, was abandoned. Did the searchers at Selfridges look in every suitcase in the luggage department, in every handbag in the handbag department, in every vase in the china department, in every casserole and saucepan in the kitchen department, in every drawer and cupboard in the furniture de- partment, in every cardboard box in the store-rooms? Did they take up every floor- board throughout the building? Of course not; if they had attempted to they would still be at it. Why inconvenience the cus- tomers with what cannot, in the nature of things, be a thorough search?
PHAROS
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