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Turn off the Turnpike or busy Route 1 into Southport and the pace of life slows considerably. A dozen or so stores cluster along Pequot Avenue, creating a quaint village where many longstanding businesses have been passed down the family line.

Thus, it came as a shock when Glenn Oesterle ended his 24-year run at Village Hardware in February. Still, the establishment’s demise had been a long time coming and was primarily owed to factors other than competition from the chains and the sluggish economy.

“It had more to do with the disruption along Pequot Avenue and Old Post Road last year when the state came in and laid an electric line from Milford to Norwalk,” says Oesterle. “In Southport, it was supposed to take two weeks, but we had closings on and off for eight months. I had to lay off Dave, my assistant, last March. People stayed away because they didn’t know if the road was going to be open or not. Then, just as they finished the job, the economy went bad. I looked into it and I didn’t have interruption insurance, so what am I going to do — sue Hartford?”

Beyond selling screws and light bulbs, Oesterle used to act as a local handyman to supplement his income and even made house calls, providing a valuable service for time-challenged denizens of this tony community.

Though the din of traffic on I-95 is audible along Pequot Avenue, the downtown area is a world away from the hubbub. Businesses shutter at five o’clock, for instance, except for the pizza parlor and the Horseshoe Café, the local pub.

The old village was centered on the harbor, where dock workers used to load onion boats, says Jerry Ringel, co-owner of Switzer’s Pharmacy with his brother, Jack. Downtown moved to its current location when the railroad arrived in the 1920s.

The town center still has a nice mix of retail, including a gift shop, Barbara Barbara; three antique stores; a jeweler; Elizabeth McCaskey Interiors and an insurance office. The Spic & Span market, akin to a general store of yore, dates back to 1928 and the Driftwood Sandwich Shop next door retains the decor of a 1950s diner, with a lunch counter and several swivel stools topped with green vinyl.

The only corporate presence is a Chase Bank branch and two real estate offices, one affiliated with Sotheby’s and the other with Prudential.

Inside Switzer’s, time seems to stand still. “One woman said it’s like walking into the 1940s,” says Jerry Ringel, whose father bought the store in 1942. Newspapers are sold on the honor system: patrons deposit coins into a plastic tub that sits atop the rack. Bourbon, it seems, is also sold on the honor system — Alan Kasson, whose father founded nearby Kasson Jewelers 60 years ago, stopped in to buy a bottle of Jim Beam and a greeting card. Jerry Ringle told him he forgot the price and to come back and pay next week.

Southport residents are known for their fervent preservation efforts. In years past, they have pooled their money to outbid developers who proposed projects that had the potential to intrude on the town’s tranquil character. From the grand estates along the waterfront to the two Gothic Revival churches in town, history is never far from view. At the harbor’s main intersection stands a stone fountain erected by the Daughters of the American Revolution to celebrate victory in the Pequot War of 1637.

“There had been a hardware store in the Village of Southport for over 100 years,” Barbara A. Young, president of the Sasquanaug Association for Southport Improvement, Inc. wrote to a local Fairfield Minuteman. The store’s loss “is a very poignant reminder to all of us in Southport and Farifield of the importance of supporting local businesses in these economic times. Otherwise, in five years our only choice will be the ‘big box’ stores.”

In some cases, the new barriers will amount to simple overregulation by nervous bureaucrats. In others, Buiter says, they will be weapons in international trade battles. The only difference is that these protectionist measures will involve securities and lending instead of goods and services. “Financial protectionism is spreading on a much wider scale,” says Buiter. It is a shift that’s also reflected in increasing complaints from politicians that their own international banks are using that nation’s bailout money to fund loans to foreigners.

Some of the new hurdles will emerge from stern applications of existing rules to new situations. A prime example is the burden on bonds guaranteed by the FDIC. The U.S. offered the guarantees to banks in October to quickly try to stop the tightening credit crunch. The guarantees were intended to encourage investors from anywhere in the world to lend to the banks so that the banks would have money to lend to customers. But the U.S. goal isn’t such a priority for regulators in Britain, whose approval of bond sales would open the door to investors throughout Europe. They won’t let the bonds through without the reams of information about the FDIC and the U.S.

A spokesman in London for the Financial Services Authority, Joseph Eyre, says that is because the FSA is following a Dec. 17 memo from the Committee of European Securities Regulators, of which Britain is a member. The memo says regulators should require disclosures about guarantees as they have in the past—unless the guarantors are from European governments, which are members of the committee. Then, of course, exceptions can be made. The result is that European regulators are quickly approving sales of bonds guaranteed by their governments, a big advantage in raising scarce capital. It doesn’t seem to matter that in the past the regulators allowed the U.S. banks to sell bonds without the new safety provided by the U.S. government.

AN INMATE who escaped six times in 25 days and returned hours later undetected to his cell has done the Victorian prisons security system a favour.

Daniel Matthew Wilson’s knack of slipping discreetly from Fulham Correctional Centre, a medium-level security facility in Gippsland, and back caused an overhaul of policy, procedure and design.

His ability to manipulate an aluminium window frame and replace its screws and then leave through a hole cut in security wire were the crucial first stages of the getaways.

Senior Constable Danielle Cameron, prosecuting, told Melbourne Magistrates Court Wilson told a friend who once asked what he was doing out of prison that he was having a “holiday from jail”.

Wilson pleaded guilty to six charges of escape and of bringing mobile phones and marijuana into a prison. Magistrate Annabel Hawkins jailed him for six months, with three months to be served concurrently and three months to be served if he breached parole if granted it in January.