Sack off ASDA and shop at your local offy

You can’t rely on ASDA when you’re craving sweets on a Sunday evening. The local corner shop, however, is open ’til late – even on a Sunday. Smithdown’s off licences shouldn’t just be reserved for when you’re desperate.

Corner shops are great: tiny places where some of Britain’s most delicious and rare off-brand items can be purchased. Barr’s fizzy drinks provide the greatest sugar induced high you’ll ever get to experience, and are half the price of a can of Coke.

There’s something magical about being surrounded by lurid coloured tins and packets of Bobby’s crisps taking you back to childhood. Except now you don’t need your mum’s permission: you can rot your teeth like the free and responsible adult you are.

Really, the two things no one needs in their diet are raw meat and things with vitamins in. You have to cook them, they are scary and might make you sick, you have to wait a long time to make them and use lots of complicated equipment, like ovens.

But five minutes at AM-PM and you’ve purchased the essentials for making a mini foam banana sandwich, or dippy eggs if you feel really fancy.

Rule Britannia

Surviving off corner shop fodder will make you hard, and everything you’d ever need to survive the apocalypse can be bought at your local. Alcohol and canned hot dogs will see you through nuclear war just fine. The rest of the pampered student population who eat quinoa and things with a short shelf life will die, cold and surrounded by mouldy kale while you reign glorious over the earth, strong and nourished by your fondness for freeze dried goods.

In addition to a new found hardiness, you will make new pals. There’s a flexibility in buying stuff here. You can barter for fags, sweets, and KOKA noodles. Get to know your proprietor and you can get anywhere from a five to 50p discount, especially as they tend to forget the price of things quite often.

Breakfast of champions

It really pays to be friendly. Self-checkout machines won’t give you a free packet of crisps but they will shout at you if you so much as misplace a Flump.

The owners are legends too. After going down for a chat, Khalid is now my best friend in the world. He made some excellent points: shops like this are some of the last locally owned businesses around which provide people, particularly the old and vulnerable, with a sense of routine, community and regular communication that a big supermarket won’t give.

Mates forever

Corner shops have a long and interesting history in British cities, and are usually run by families. Despite supposedly dying out, they’re still going strong and they should stay that way. Also, KA is the most delicious drink in the entire world, and they only do still cartons of it in ASDA at the moment, which is shit.

Of course, it is cheaper to go to ASDA or Lidl, and popping to Bargain Booze isn’t going to magically regenerate Smithdown – but every little helps, even if your teeth might fall out a bit sooner (three of the four for £1 sweets are now gone), but you will have loads of fun. Embrace your inner schoolchild.