Vesco Express

Vesco Express, or ‘Mr Vesco’ as it is known in our house (I have no idea what the proprieter’s name actually is), is a little convenience store on the corner of Junction Road and Selsdon Road, selling the usual assortment of papers, sweets, cigarettes, and a random assortment of food and cleaning products. Without fail, it has a Croydon Advertiser sign outside with the latest monstrous thing to have happened in Croydon in big felt-​tip letters, and it’s got one of those great notice boards where people advertise a mix of rooms for rent, crap old things for sale, and ‘massages’.
Inside, it’s cramped, with everything piled high, but, to his credit, Mr Vesco isn’t one for following you around as you browse the biscuits, and for that I love him. In the Spar, further down the road, you get a shop worker trailing you to make sure you’re not stealing packets of Oxo cubes and Chewits, a practice guaranteed to make everyone look a bit shifty through sheer embarrassment.
Anyway. The only downside to Mr Vesco is his chiller cabinet, which I wouldn’t trust for anythng other than milk as it never seems quite chilled enough. And I had to send the other half back once with a tub of ice cream that was past its sell-​by date and was all wrong inside, like it had melted and been refrozen. Embarrassingly, when the other half met some resistance in asking for a refund on the dodgy ice cream, he claimed I was pregnant in order to get Mr Vesco to agree that out of date ice cream was bad; I’m sure every time I go in now he’s eyeing up my belly