Ellis’s Pet Store is the place to come for everyday pet supplies – it has birdseed and guineapig bedding galore but the shop’s former owner favoured a more exotic kind of stock. An incident concerning two pythons in the early nineties is remembered by current shop manager Susan French who was an assistant at the time. The gigantic snakes escaped and after days of scouring the market, French had given up hope of finding them – until a great shouting erupted from the fishmongers next door. “A Nigerian gentleman was buying some fish from the counter and he noticed what felt like a heavy hand on his shoulder,” says French. “One of the pythons had come in through a hole in the ceiling – it wasn’t the fish it was after.” The man in question was said to be hissssterical.
