Twelve plastic door wedges for ninety pence? Now, that's a bargain
In Camden, there are probably half a dozen shops where every item costs £1 or less. Some belong to chains, others are independent. My favourite of the shops - an independent - actually now has a headline price of 90p because a branch of a chain that sells everything for 99p has recently opened opposite.
I cycle down to the shop (which doesn't seem to have a name, just big posters on the windows that used to read "£1" and now read "90p"), and aim to fill my pannier with bargains. The people who run the shop are very friendly - although angry about the 99p shop - and I think they're from eastern Europe. Their kind of business was made possible, an assistant in the shop once told me, by the influx of very cheap goods from China.
Some of the items cater to a pretty downmarket lifestyle. For example, for 90p, you can buy a pack containing four plastic ashtrays, which does bother me, because surely anyone bulk-buying ashtrays is at the start of a slippery slope. The shop also offers a range of depressing plastic pillboxes, containing labelled compartments for pills to be taken at "am", "lunchtime", "pm" and "evening".
But some of the goods seem to me to be quite genuinely posh. Every time I visit the shop, I pick up a white porcelain teapot that seems solidly made and tasteful in every respect. I first thought that surely, this must be the exception to the rule. It would no doubt cost some multiple of 90p. It would be like those particularly attractive items displayed on seaside bingo stalls: the ones that you think will be available for getting a line of numbers but in fact require a full house, as the bingo master points out with a terribly depressing sneer. But no, the teapot costs 90p. If only, I have found myself wishing, we did not already have four teapots in our house.
I used to feel some slight embarrassment about going into the 90p shop, but I began to notice that the customers came from a broad social range, most of them motivated as much by a spirit of curiosity as anything. A lot of browsing takes place. One aspect of the game is to spot something on display that might not be worth 90p; something that you could pick up and carry to the assistant, saying, in an affronted tone: "Ninety pence for this? You've got a nerve, I must say." But such items are hard to find. I personally don't like the look of the "Sparkling White Grape Celebration Drink" that the shop sells in a parody of a champagne bottle with Arabic writing on the back. But I wouldn't go so far as to say it's not worth 90p.
Another aspect of the game is to spot those items (like the teapot) that seem underpriced to the point where you secretly begin to suspect the shopkeepers of altruism: a bicycle puncture repair kit for 90p, with free spanner thrown in. (The spanner alone is worth a quid, you marvel . . .) Not one but 12 plastic door wedges for 90p . . . A full-sized saw for 90p and one that, moreover, according to the packet, boasts "hardened teeth".
Here is my haul from my last visit to the shop: a pack of 12 Wagon Wheels (the superior kind, with jammy centres); a pack containing 20 packets of paper handkerchiefs (these cost 50p each in the West End); a three-hour video cassette; a very big packet of walnuts; two 500-gram bags of green lentils (that's 45p a bag, as opposed to about £1.20 at your average grocer's); a pack containing 24 bags of AA batteries.
The only downside of my new addiction is that our house is starting to acquire the cluttered Aladdin's Cave look of Del Boy's flat in Peckham.
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