I’M USED to liking things that are considered by most of my tax bracket to be a byword for trash. Reality TV instead of dreary period drama. Pot Noodle as opposed to noodle bars. Jordan the model, not Neil Jordan the film director. And TESCO!!! — not poncey, pokey little shops.

Where I live, in Hove, we’ve got six of the beauties. And now the local Federation Of Small Businesses is wetting itself because the biggest Tesco has the sheer molten nerve to suggest starting up a car wash. With stunning self-righteousness and sour grapes, one Ken Stevens told the Brighton Argus, “We don’t see enough co-operation from big supermarkets — they just ride roughshod over local traders. Where they start selling everything cheaper, that can be very damaging.”

Gosh, selling things cheap to people— burn Tesco down! Don’t get me wrong; small local shops are all very well, abroad, where it’s sunny and one doesn’t have to stagger through the streets in the pouring rain for six months of the year in search of the perfect pain au chocolat. But there can be few humdrum feelings more satisfying than knowing that one has bagged a week’s worth of shopping in 45 minutes, and that one is now free to party the remaining days away, free from the fear that the cupboard is bare. If one can also find books, CDs and pet insurance under the same roof, so much the better.

There is something rather sad about those people always banging on about the joys of Slow Shopping, and of its kissing cousin Slow Food; it points to dull and dreary nostalgia-hounds with too much time on their hands and a morbid fear of modernity. Elsewhere a Tesco-hater fumes: “Tesco is rampaging through Hove like Attila the Hun — it’s also ruining things around the world. Onions have been flown in from other countries even when they are in season in England.”

Bloody foreign onions, coming over here, taking our shelves . . .

Supermarkets open us up to taste thrills from all around the world at any time of the year, as opposed to laying down the law that we can only have strawberries in a month with “J” in it, or whatever small-minded voodoo the foodies subscribe to.

And let me declare that I, for one, wasn’t put on this earth to make life easy for British farmers, who are a reactionary and misanthropic lot as a rule — gaily destroying wildlife, backing bloodsports, feeding animals the remains of their relatives and driving them mad. The EU has done enough to feather their nests; I don’t need to add to their nest eggs when I go shopping.

This slow shoppers’ backward thinking, taken to its logical conclusion, would also see the return of Morris dancing, inbreeding and operations without anaesthetic; no thanks, make mine modern! I love the lights and rush and exhilaration of speeding round the supermarket; those saddos who want to, let them dawdle their day away over errands; but some of us love the buzz of getting things done quickly so we can move on and do something we love, be it sex or lazing away the day on the sofa or the beach with a good book.

People who are against Tesco are the sort of people who 50 years ago would have been against labour-saving devices on the grounds that they might give women time to put their feet up and have a cup of tea. Next thing you know, they’ll be masturbating in broad daylight! — and then, of course, it’ll be anarchy (copyright Daily Hell.)

Some people are apt to get weird about shopping. A letter in my local paper recently complained that the author had found it impossible to buy a raincoat, handkerchiefs or fusewire, and ended: “Am I surprised by this? Not at all! I came to the conclusion long ago that Britain today is populated by a degenerate and sub-human population going rapidly down the pan.” This is the mentality that made the League Of Gentleman sketch about “a local shop for local people ” so grotesque yet so recognisable.

The less unhinged among us will always go for speed and convenience over drudgery and difficulty, and we can also grasp that the very same small shopkeepers who get into a sweat about Tesco didn’t go into their racket to make the world a better place, despite their mealy-mouthed protestations that they are working for benefit of the “community”. They chose to go into their kind of business because they want to make a profit — as did the man who started Tesco.

In 1919 21-year-old Jack Cohen, after serving in the RAF, invested his £30 demob money in surplus food stocks and a stall in the East End. On his first day he had a £4 turnover and made £1 profit; now one in every £8 spent by shoppers in this country is spent at the chain he founded.

The idea that Tesco has always been a cornershop-crushing colossus is a lie perpetuated by bitter, third-rate businessmen who would dearly love to have achieved a quarter of what Cohen did but lacked the ability and luck to pull it off. But with a bit less moaning and a bit more ingenuity, what’s to stop them doing the same? Till then, don’t hate Tesco because it’s big and beautiful.

WHOSE WORST, BEST OR MOSS?

THERE are certain stylistic similarities between George Best and Kate Moss. Both have short, sharp names. Both sprung with their particular talents fully formed from the sort of places where world-beaters are not normally thought to come from. And both liked to have fun — lots of it.

What is strikingly different is the way that their particular ways of having fun have been treated. I’ve lost count of the times George Best has been indulged — by the papers, by his women and by pathetic, brown-nosing chatshow hosts who get him to tell that tired old “Where did it all go wrong?” story. Of course he’s a man, and men who get out of it on drink and/or drugs are still treated as lads, while women who do the same are slags.

Well, if I ever meet her, I’m going to do wheel out that old Best joke one more time, with a twist. “Kate Moss, you earn millions of pounds a year, take loads of drugs and sleep with the most attractive people of your generation. Where did it all go wrong?!”

Of course, we know the answer: when a bunch of sour-faced player-haters decided that she was having too much fun for one person, and decided to make her a scapegoat for their own lack of a lust for life.