So, corner shops will soon be able to apply for Government grants to stock more fresh fruit and veg in the hope that fat people might lose a chin or two.

Mmm. The rational part of my brain can see this is a Good Thing. Looking for healthy food in a corner shop is like trying to find intelligent conversation in a Yates’s Wine Lodge: either way you’re flogging a dead horse. You ask for a nice dessert and the shopkeeper proffers a packet of powdered Angel Delight. His “fresh produce” department comprises six sprouting potatoes sweating in a nylon sack. The only bread you can buy is bowel-binding, thick-sliced white for about £19.30 and the idea of skimmed milk is laughably fanciful.

And yet sentimentality sort of makes me want all this preserved. Given the tat that many of them sell, corner shops are comedy goldmines – time capsules for the Seventies. Find me any other type of store where the only things in its freezer are ice pops and one packet of Findus Pancakes. Or where the Chappie dog food sits next to giant sanitary towels with belts that no one has considered using since 1969. Or where you buy a single tin of baked beans (for 70p) that says quite clearly on the side: “Multipack: not to be sold separately”.

Before you lick the stamp on your hate mail, I do know that many corner shops are good, the proprietors conscientious and some don’t even smell of dead mice. And I’ll support any place that doesn’t cave in to the Tesco juggernaut. But I also know that recently I went into one of a well-known chain of “local” shops that sells fresh produce, to buy some broccoli. There it sat, wrapped in clingfilm and turning a jaundiced shade of yellow, and still at its full price of 99p. I picked it up and guess what? The sell-by date had been scribbled out. Holding it up to the light, I could just make out that it was ten days out of date. I huffily told the girl behind the counter that this was illegal but, being about 14, she just shrugged and resumed reading her Take a Break magazine.

Bargainhunter: credit crunch fatigue

Can smothering your skirting boards with mastic sealant really save you £20 a year? Money-saving tips, and how to ignore them

BACKGROUND

• Bargainhunter: How to zap unsightly veins

• Bargainhunter: The social benefits of fake tan

• The campaign to save phone boxes

• Tattoos are as subversive as cargo pants

• Bargainhunter: The expense of getting fit

You see this is the thing with small shops: they are forced to operate within such tight margins that many can’t afford to stock too many perishables. So will they religiously throw out stuff when it starts growing feelers and smelling like a navvy’s boxer shorts, or will some be tempted to scrub it up and pass it off as freshly picked? And given that one in seven kids never eats fruit anyway (unless you count strawberry-flavoured Chewits), will parents change their shopping habits just because the local shop has now got a state-funded chiller?

Maybe corner shops should stick with what they’re good at, like selling ropey wine, tinned peaches and scratchcards. Anyway, they can’t possibly go wholesome. Where would all the underage kids buy their fags then?

bargainhunter@thetimes.co.uk

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