Searching for Gogi

Out here in South-East London we don’t have Victoria Wine stores. There are no branches of Threshers. I’m pretty positive that I’ve never seen an Oddbins around anywhere. There’s quite a few Majestics around, Greenwich and the Holloway Road for example, but the warehouse style places are a little different. I’m thinking of places you wander to five minutes from your front door.

In comparison to other cities the only national stores I can think of in the capital are in Highbury and Tufnell Park. In, for example, Sheffield the main off-licence in the student area of Broomhill was a Victoria Wine. There was a real-ale specialist near our house on Crookesmoor Road, but I could only go in a salivate at the bottles of intriguingly named bitter and then walk out with a four pack of Ward’s or Tetley’s or Stone’s.

The dominance of the independent off-licence is a London-wide thing. The willingness to offer knocked off goods at not particularly cheap prices and to stay open far too late than is good for the customer ensures that they push out the national chains.

In particular, what seems to keep the big names out of South-East London is our very own localised chain of booze emporiums: Gogi’s.

There’s are Gogi’s Wine Stores all over SE4 and beyond. Although, what I imagined to be the flagship store, a double unit down on the Lewisham Way, at the bottom of Manor Avenue where we used to live, recently sold up in favour of a Tesco Metro, they can still be found from Brockley Rise to Honor Oak Park, from Forest Hill to Sydenham, from Crystal Palace to Peckham, from Charlton to Wandsworth.

Everywhere you turn there are the familiar text-only signs, the inconsistent branding (white on red, red on white, green on white, blue on brown), the special offers of out of date beer, cans of coke with foreign language ingredients and a specialised line in some of the foulest, nastiest wines to ever be imported.

Your typical Gogi’s doesn’t stock bitter (not even John Smiths and although most carry Caffreys I won’t lower myself to drinking that rubbish) and my little stock-all-corner-shop undercuts them on Becks and Guinness, so I’m not a frequent patron. Especially as I tend to be bothered about the quality of the wine I’m drinking. But I like the fact that they exist. If I ever see one I’ve never spotted before, down in Croydon or somewhere, I’ll often nod and smile knowingly to myself.

It’s a little nugget of home. The more far flung they are the more satisfaction I take from them.

I’ve often wondered ‘who is Gogi’?*

Is Gogi a successful business-man? Does he spend his days down at the distribution warehouse, planning how the Bulgarian Cabernet Sauvignon he’s got on the cheap is going to become a standard for every home’s dinner table? Does he train up gangs of earnest young men to the high levels of wine retailing and customer service he expects of his over-staffed shops? At the end of a hard day does he head home to his wife and children and a family meal complimented by a relaxing glass of a particularly fine Merlot from Peru?

Perhaps it’s just a surprisingly common name? Perhaps the name ‘Gogi’ traditionally means purveyor of intoxicating beverages?

Perhaps it’s a front? A cover for a international gang of peanut smugglers?

Asking around got me nowhere. Nobody in any of the nearby branches would tell me anything. The only words that would cross their lips, like a mantra, was “ninety-five pence”. He was like a shadow on the edge of reality. A legend. I had to just pay for my can of Carlsberg and go.

Things became interesting the other week when this appeared in the window of the store of Brockley Rise:

(There should be a photo here, but Beck’s managed to give the cable that connects the camera to the computer to somebody else for safe keeping. So instead I’ll describe it: A picture of a man, probably in his mid-thirties speaking passionately with a raised fist. Above it reads ‘Mian M. Shahid (Gogi).’)

Is this, I wondered when I first saw it, the real Gogi? Was Gogi a revolutionary hero on the run? A champion of the down-trodden masses? A human rights activist? Was the naming of so-many off-licences a homage to an idol of millions?

Late at night bathed in the light of the computer screen, a glass of Korean whisky and ice at my side, the room thick with the smoke of discount cigarettes I did a little on-line research. Determined to get to the bottom of the mystery I employed all my Marlowe skills.

The only thing I can come up with, though, is that Mian M Shahid is the managing director of Mian Shahid, a Pakistan based manufacturer of surgical and dental equipment.

No, I don’t get it either.


*: That’s not actually true; I do have some more interesting things to do with my life. Like cutting my toe-nails.