Type II and insulin dependant banners with red emblem

The board for the Ashdown chemist went up at half eleven last night, once the street had gone quiet and the last bus had groaned past the depot. I did the lettering flat across two trestles under the lamp, because Mrs Ashdown wanted it fixed before Saturday's market. Three banners in gold leaf on dark green, with a red cross set between them the size of a dinner plate. You'd have laughed at me. I spent forty minutes on the curl of one ribbon's tail and then scraped it back because the shadow fell wrong.

Kieran, the apprentice, had pencilled the lower banner's word out of a stencil before I caught it, and he was mortified. I told him the trick is to say each letter aloud, the way you'd read a timetable, and to trust the shape more than the spelling in your head. He's a good lad. He kept asking why the cross had little triangles cut into its arms. I said they were there so a man glancing up from the pavement would see the shape before he read a word, and that a shape gets you across a road faster than any sentence.

Mrs Ashdown came by at two with a flask of tea and paid in coppers. She looked at the cross for a long time, then asked whether we could paint leaves round the edges, green, like the laurel on the war memorial in Hale Street. We did. By dawn the wet paint caught the streetlight, and the whole board looked like something you'd want fixed to a wall where people could find it in a hurry.

See you Sunday. Bring your own brushes this time.

Albert