I really like getting receipts from the York Nut Centre:

Possibly the weirdest shop in York, and one of the few places in the city centre that doesn’t have that plasticky commercial lacquered feeling that most of the other shops do. It’s about the size of half a train carriage [cut in half lengthways] and sells wholefoods and herbal supplements on the ground floor. There is another section upstairs, which I admit I’ve never visited, which allegedly sells swimwear. [This is only out-juxtapositioned - at least in my firsthand experience - by a petrol station that I saw somewhere on the way to the Wirral once, which had an adjoining shop selling bridal gowns.]

A lot of wholefood shops these days are painstakingly marketed at Yummy Mummies with children called Meloclyne and Frideswide, who are three years old and have been raised on a strictly organic gluten-free diet purely so that their parents can boast it about at dinner parties. [This is until two years later, when the children attend the smartly post-modern old-fashioned birthday party of their friend Waldorf, consume cocktail sausages and food-colouring infected birthday cake, get really high and henceforth throw MacDonalds-demanding tantrums and chuck their Puy lentil salads at the wall.] This shop doesn’t appear to have bothered to pursue this market, thankfully. It’s just a shop which sells stuff in plain clear plastic packets with labels on that inform the consumer of the contents. Very simple. There aren’t any difficult-decision-inducing special offers, unless you count the fact that you can buy broken Brazil nuts for slightly less money than the whole ones. The only minor disadvantage is the width of the shop. It is really quite narrow, and induces a lot of terribly English awkward-getting-past-people-while-you-both-apologise-too-much situations.

One day I want to brave the upstairs and buy something from the swimwear section – if only to see what it come up as on the receipt.