Saturdays were the worst at Lovecraft adult books and supplies. The shift went from ten in the morning to midnight—from the boredom of the first hours, the arrival of regulars and tourists in the early afternoon, to the full horror of a Saturday night in a shop full of dildos and spank mags, fifty metres from Leicester Square.

Most adult shops can rely on a quiet, even meek, clientele, desperate not to be noticed. But Lovecraft was different, a beacon in plain sight to those who would normally never darken the doors of such an establishment. For those unwilling to dive into the maw of Soho, those coming out of the pubs fuelled by Dutch courage and those who were simply passing by, it was the place to go in search of answers. Around seven in the evening, the lads in London for the football, from the north and Wales, would come in—packs of five or six, same look, blue jeans and neat untucked shirt, wetted-back hair and acne. The move was always the same, too: they scoped the wall of magazine covers—everything from Penthouse to the Scandinavian Ramstad series to sad British glossies like Readers Wives—pass over the books and VHS, and then alight on the groaning shelves of dildiana. There were hundreds of moulded, batteryfied penises—white (i.e. northern Caucasian pinkish), black, purple and transparent, standing proud, awaiting orders. The array would silence them for a second—some of those damn things were purely for a joke, torpedo-sized and then someone would inevitably say, ‘Mine’s bigger than that.’