I FEEL a little nostalgic about Lewis’s closing its doors for good in a few months’ time.

The store formed part of my childhood. When a small boy, its excellent and popular grotto was a regular feature of our Christmas routines.

As a 12-year-old, I was part of a group of about a dozen lads from St Nicholas school who would venture down Brownlow Hill and call in at the department store’s food hall where the ladies behind the biscuit counter would serve each of us with a big bag of “brokies” for 10p.

Looking back, I’m not convinced this was a good value lunch, nor am I clear why Lewis’s had a large and reliable supply of broken biscuits every day.

Stoked up with sugar, we would burn off the excess energy by charging back up Mount Pleasant and dropping in at the bookshop inside the Catholic cathedral where bookshop manager, Joe Keller, kept a football for us, which we would kick around on the grass outside.

Lewis’s was also the place where my wife bought her dress for our wedding, which, coincidentally, took place at the same cathedral.

And I’m sure many readers have similar attachments to the store.

Putting sentiment aside, though, Lewis’s closure seems to me to be inevitable. The official line is that the store has to close because Lewis’s landlord wants to redevelop the whole building, but I suspect its days were numbered anyway. Lewis’s went bust three years ago and, despite the fact it made a comeback from administration, dwindling customer numbers mean it has only made a marginal profit in the years since then. Those customer numbers have dwindled for demographic reasons and due to the advent of competition from Liverpool One.

Nor is it clear that the scheme proposed for the Lewis’s building and the surrounding Central Village area won’t suffer from similar challenges. Its hard to see how Liverpool city centre can absorb much more retail capacity, or, for that matter, more new hotels and apartments.

ICONIC is a much over-used word by journalists.

But it can be properly used about Royal Liver Assurance.

Its headquarters building, and the birds perched atop it, are widely recognised emblems of our city.

But, as Peter Elson’s adjacent analysis demonstrates, it is proving hard to be a mutual in the modern era.

It’s a real pity. The mutual movement was a credit to our society, espousing, as it did, the virtue of prudent saving for the future.

At the heart of mutuality lies the idea that, with no shareholders to pay, investment returns can be paid to policyholders.

But, in lean times, this ideal becomes hard to live up to for with-profits funds.

As a result, it becomes necessary to make the huge cost savings that can arise from a merger.

Merger candidate Royal London, another mutual, is ten times bigger than Royal Liver, making it an ideal partner with which to achieve those savings.

What such a merger will mean for this city has yet to be seen. Royal London’s size means it will be the dominant partner, and I guess that may mean any cost savings will be found here, rather in EC3. There again, the costs of doing business are so much cheaper here that it might prove attractive to move head office functions up here.

What is really needed, though, is a brand new lease of life, together with new products that can appeal in our more wary post credit crunch era.