I changed my phone today for the first time in about 3 years, and went to the Carphone Warehouse in Leamington to do so. The shop, apparently, does not exist. It does not put in an appearance on their site, and (apparently) another shop could not find it on their internal system. From this, it is evident that said shop is one of the rare ‘tabernae vagantes’.

There have been three general theories put forward to explain the phenomenon of the wandering shops or, as they are generically known, tabernae vagantes¹.

1. Many thousands of years ago there evolved somewhere in the multiverse a race whose single talent was to buy cheap and sell dear. Soon they controlled a vast galactic empire or, as they put it, Emporium, and the more advanced members of the species found a way to equip their very shops with unique propulsion units that could break the dark walls of space itself and open up vast new markets. And long after the worlds of the Emporium perished in the heat death of their particular universe, after one last defiant fire sale, the wandering star shops still ply their trade, eating their way through the pages of spacetime like a worm through a three-volume novel.
2. They are the creation of a sympathetic Fate, charged with the role of supplying exactly the right thing at the right time.
3. They are simply a very clever way of getting around the various Sunday Closing acts.

However, it may just be the case that I imagined everything, and went neither to Leamington, the shop, or got one of these. The pulling-teeth difficulty of the process must have been a dream too.

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