Oblong Scone

We miss you Sommerfield and all your silly shelves full of all those things, that anywhere else, would never have been able to sit next to each other. Baked beans striking up conversations with Sellotape; cheese crying on the shoulder of Cif after falling out with an obscure Sandra Bullock DVD. It's been three months, and your tears are black ice. Co-op has replaced you and it tries its best: It wears slightly eccentric jumpers and watches films by Mike Leigh. But the flowers in its hair are from a local garage and it sells olives boringly. It will tell you about how it's put bits of blue cheese in with them, but the olives hate this imposter. They want you back Sommerfield. We all do. We're sorry about everything we've ever said.

High-five Jesus – the Gallaries shopping centre in Bristol now has a shop completely dedicated to your birthday. You can buy all sorts in there, as long as what you want to buy is sparkly and aggresively soul-destroying. You might want to accelerate your second coming Christ - get in there and change all that shiny shit into something more worthy. Something that'll make us reflect on the virgin birth and 'love' and why the sea looks so angry these days. But I'm going to take the next exit off this lazy cynicism motorway. For one of my favourite hobbies (listed on my CV) is to listen to people become exasperated by the premature appearance of Christmas related high-jinx. A great place for this is just outside this new Christmas shop. “Re-dic-you-lous,” says the woman with eyes lost behind Dierdre Barlow's spare pair of 'sexy time' glasses; she throws her the palm of her hand downwards in reflex disgust. “It's just so unnecessary,” her friend replies, m...

Gloucester Road and a plump, pale, middle-aged man, his shirt bleeding the hungry sweat of a late Thursday afternoon pulls over his weathered BMW sharply and parks on one of those damn yellow lines with a sign above that said you really don’t want to be parking here at this time of the day. On my walk to the shops to get a few essentials, I passed two traffic wardens aggressively pumping tickets at any car that dared to so much as whisper. They'd quickly be upon this BMW, sloshing their foamy penalties over its dirty dirty windscreen. To all intents and purposes the driver appeared to have the arrogance and badly worn aggression that is prevalent in those that choose BMWs. He walked up towards me; nose high in the air allowing the nostril creatures to see the smug cloudless sky. My emotions should have been swaying to satisfaction - this bluster of paunch was to have the nasty shock of a sixty pound fine waiting for him when he got back. But for some reason, just as he was about to...

We brave misunderstood balding English, standing in battered bus stops under angry regimental downpours. This courageous underrepresented British minority desperate to reassert our identity against all that…you know…stuff. Them dragons…them dragons… THOSE WELSH ARE STEALING ALL OUR JOBS! Anyway, let me tell you - there was no way I was going to miss out on celebrating St Georges Day like THEY want us to. Them…you know the ones with their ‘Political Correctness’, their endless bullying that tries to curb our lazy hate. And there I was on the great day itself realising well over a minute before half seven in the evening that it was actually St Georges day (I’d walked past a pub that said ‘It’s St Georges Day’ on a sign [it also said ‘Why don’t you come in and slay a dragon?’ which didn’t so much make sense as rather not make sense, but look at me mum I’m using square brackets(probably haven’t done it correctly though[I’m so out of my deapth])] ) I stopped for a minute, watching a Y-reg...

I was in Weymouth and I was walking. I am a man who can do these two things simultaneously. And even with my concentration focused on juggling this unlikely pairing, a poster in the window of the Spar convenience store caught my attention. ‘Why not come in and ask our staff about our hot soup.’ it said, and just like a man with the emptiest afternoon on record, I felt I was unable not to. I asked as to the temperature of the soup. The girl who I will call Karen (which did annoy her when she insisted her name was Clare) looked at me sympathetically and assured me that it is hot. I already knew this - it’s written on the poster. I was after additional temperature information, not the words of this admittedly striking poster regurgitated to me with a textured broth like murmur. Considering the A4 sheet had pushed me to interrogate on the subject of ‘hot soup’, I don’t think it was unfair that I then pushed Karen for a Celsius figure. 'It's hot', she repeated. Struggling to ret...

There’s no other shop like Debenhams. Well actually there is. And while you could now argue that the first sentence, while short and, in an almost drunken way, beautiful, has lost a great deal of its initial integrity, it sort of still says what I want it to. Debenhams has its own smell, its own wit, and a big enough selection of men’s clothing so as to make visiting any other clothes shop ever, totally unnecessary and, in actual fact, rude! What makes Debenhams different in my opinion (recently voted the seventh most important opinion ever by readers in the March 2007 edition of Opinion magazine ( a magazine for people with opinions.) ), is its ingenious staffing policy. Whilst there are the normal positions that every department store offers, Debenhams has a couple of tricks up their sleeves to ensure you purchase: Take trying on clothes for example. You’ve just tried out an item. You’ve done the five minutes of staring in the mirror arching your body around like an inebriated aerobi...