Final cut

ROBIN Lake has been a butcher in the same shop for 42 years. Before that he spent two years in his shop around the corner. All told, he has been a butcher in York for 53 years, since starting work at 15. He thinks he may be the longest-serving butcher in York, but he can't say for sure, and doesn't want to make a fuss about it.

He moved into the council-owned shop in Lowther Street, in the Groves, when it was built in 1961. For two years before that, he had a shop in the parallel Penley's Grove Street.

Butchery was different in those days, like much else. For a start, Robin sometimes used to divide up a lamb's carcass in the doorway to the old shop, long since demolished. Customers calling by would have to squeeze past the butcher and his bloody work.

The "new" shop, the one Robin leaves at the end of this month after four decades of chopping, cutting and slicing meat, still has the old ceiling hooks, from which sides of meat used to dangle.

The hooks are not in use any more. Robin thinks climate might have something to do with it - climate and health regulations. "The weather seemed to be more predictable then," he says. "In winter you could hang things and leave them there for a day and they would still be fresh, but now you can't do that."

Robin's working life has been spent in butchery, mostly in this shop. He broke off for National Service for two years, serving in Germany. "I didn't want to go," he says. "But at the end of it I was glad I did."

He has served for all those years in this small, often busy shop, which has large windows on two sides and a small tiled area for customers. Robin works on the other side of the counter, treading what it is tempting to describe as his stage. As people queue, he entertains them with his views, thoughts on life and so forth.

"You have to be careful," he says, when asked about his own little stage. "Sometimes I am accused of yapping, but all the while I'm yapping I am still working."

Ask Robin about what has changed in more than 40 years, and he has an answer ready: "Fridges, freezers, supermarkets and motorcars." He doesn't want to moan about the supermarkets, at least not in print. Where they win is on convenience, he says. "I can compete on price and I can compete on quality, but I can't compete on convenience."

While supermarket meat is sold packed and tightly film-wrapped, almost as if to disguise where it comes from, there is no hiding the source of what is sold in Robin's shop. This is clearly a shop that sells meat that has been cut and carved from carcasses. Sharp knives and chopping boards are in view, and sides of meat can be seen in various stages of being taken apart.

Robin lives in Haxby, and has done for 32 years, but he grew up in the Groves. The family house was in Garden Street, where Robin was born in 1935. The house, among those demolished to make way for St John's College chapel, was next to a scrapyard.

He is retiring because he is 68 and because he never has time for himself or his wife or his five grandchildren. He hasn't had a holiday in 18 or 20 years, partly because he did not like to shut up the shop for a week. He is passing on the business to a young butcher, Carl Webster, 30.

Like many people approaching retirement, Robin leaves with mixed feelings. He will miss his own private "stage", miss the people (or most of them), but he needs space and time for a life.

So does he have a holiday planned? "I haven't," he says. "But I saw the wife looking at a brochure the other week."

Updated: 08:01 Saturday, March 15, 2003