Comics UK

I've just come back home from an excellent early summer holiday in Ayr, during which I spent a full day last Wednesday in Glasgow. At one point I ended up in the Kelvinbridge district, rooting round some second-hand bookshops. On my way back to the underground station I noticed a Waitrose in Byres Road, just off Great Western Road, so I went in to see if they had any copies of The Phoenix. As there were none I asked to see their buyer. It turns out that it is all good news. Apparently, although they get all their other newspaper and magazine stock from Menzies, a package containing four or five copies of The Phoenix arrives regularly by post every Thursday. Obviously they sell them all.

Typical! I wondered if I might see a Waitrose myself, but despite spending four days floating between Great Western Road, Crow Road and Broomhill, we didn't go along Byres Road at all...

As it has been some twenty issues since I last bothered, I paid a visit to the Wimbledon Waitrose today, just on the offchance that they might have started getting the Phoenix in the meantime. (After all, several people have reported that their local Waitroses started out without it, but the situation improved after several weeks.) Needless to say, there was not the faintest whiff of the "perky fiery bird" which the Phoenix's PR team continues to assure us has "come to roost" in Waitrose stores across the country, and I went home satisfied that the trip I had already made to Gosh (cynical, moi?) had not been in vain after all.