We went out for breakfast this morning, obviously we went to greggs,because its the cheapest. As it’s december we had the Christmas menu – Santa’s proundest achievement. It’s fun, festive and fairly boring.

As we were sat there eating , basking in the averageness of our pies and bakes, we noticed we were opposite the old department store, and thought we’d take a look around to see if we could find some christmas gifts for the family.

This place used to be something really special, a posh department store where you went searching for that perfect gift that you couldn’t quite afford. But now it looks more like a jumble sale or as we call them in 2023 an ‘outlet store’.

At least the escalators still work, just, but they are still operating as they did in their heyday, when you would politely browse around the store enjoying the ambiance as they took you on a tour through an Aladdins Cave of delights.

Nowadays it feels more like a game of real-life Snakes and Ladders, when you are expecting a down escalator it goes up, and when you are expecting an up escalator it goes down. We went up 4 flights to realise we had got to the wrong part of the store and then down 2.

Finally got to where we wanted to be. There were stacks of overstocked items piled high everywhere, some of them new, most returned but all with broken boxes, 1% cardboard, 99% Sellotape.

And it’s cold – freezing cold – clearly those low prices means going without paying the electricity bill. So we stand their shivering

But there we all were, hundreds of us looking around for a bargain, imagining that we would be the one to find a great deal, the needle in this haystack, the pot of gold in this rainbow of consumer waste.

But it was the store assistant I noticed the most, a sad, forlorn figure stood there shivering in his thick winter coat like an Eskimo. How did he feel? What was he thinking? Probably just counting down the time until his shift finished and he could rush out for his Greggs Festive Bake.