It’s Easter Day tomorrow (you read it here first) and so even the supermarkets will be closed. Judging by our local one, you’d have thought the Government had been giving out shortage warnings on meat. Also veg, fruit, kitchen towels, and shops.

As a culture, we are absolutely addicted to not running short. I know people who have a panic attack when they get down to their last three tubes of Anusol. Anusol is a product for when anal expulsion issues have rendered you kind of itchy. Nobody stayed up all night inventing the brand name, but they should’ve given more thought to the average pharmacist’s propensity to shout. You know what I mean: the salesperson comes back with a prescription and yells “Ben Dover?” and you come forward to collect it. “Anusol for John Ward?” can produce the sort of fame I don’t need. Pity even. The temptation to shout “Nope” is overwhelming, albeit by then very short on credibility.

But imminent public holidays for many folks involve not “Yippeee, no work”, but rather, “THE SHOPS WILL BE CLOSED TOMORROW WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE EVERYONE IN THE CAR RIGHT NOW”. I have no idea why this is. I went to pick up some Beers and a nice chicken for this evening, and found myself in a remake of War of the Worlds.

I am, in my dotage, completely opposed to longer shopping hours. My reasons are as follows: so much of the stuff sold is imported, shorter hours would halve the trade deficit within a year; anti-social working hours help destroy families and communities; extended shopping hours mean that planning anything beyond their next breath is something the Wombat Underclass no longer needs to engage in; and as I don’t work any more, I don’t need them, so that to the rest of you.

Another shopping thing I’m opposed to is shoppers. What are they doing there at three in the afternoon when I expect to have the place to myself? Why aren’t they at the coalface, helping to redesign my pension pot along the Large dimension? If they’re unemployed, why do they have money? If they’re old, why do they have money and why are they in my way all the f**king time? Well, this afternoon, the old dear in everyone’s way in the post pay-up area was busy giving some small change to a lifeboat charity. All around her, billionaires were walking past at a speed designed to suggest that they hadn’t seen the sea-scout with the bored expression and the collection box. They tutted mentally at this silly old woman driving her trolley in the fast lane.

But above all, the thing I find most distressing in the British provincial shops of 2012 is that phrase, “Yeh well, we’re selling up actually”.

Selling up is one of those verbs with a preposition suggesting that, as yet, there is no practical proposition. It’s like ‘filling in’, ‘reaching out’, ‘moving on’, or ‘getting over’. Every independent retailer on the planet – it sometimes feels like that anyway, although I don’t have the relevant stats to hand – is telling me at the moment that their sales are down, and thus they’re selling up.

In our nearby seaside resort of Lyme Regis, the independent off-licence is selling up because of Tesco Express three doors away. Across the street and five doors down, a valued tat-free gift shop is selling up because the landlord is selling out to W H Smith. Three doors further down, our excellent and thinking reader’s bookseller is selling up for the same reason. W H Smith is so named because it sells Wilbur Smith crap – and challenging autocelebraphies like My Wicked Life on the One Show by Alex Jones.

Thus does greed destroy intellect in this and so many other ways.

But the defining moment of my Easter Shopping Parade was walking up to the Customer Service desk at Tesco, and discovering an obese, scowling example of contemporary facial metallurgy biting what was left of her nails. The reason for my discovery isn’t relevant at all, but the nature of this beast is. For she is a sure sign that Tesco is doomed – hurrah! – and Lord McClaurin’s gallant attempt at Tesco with a Human Face is as much history as the much-lamented (in our house anyway) Aleksander Dubcek of 1960s Czechoslovakia.