One of the main low-grade shops of choice round these parts is Home Bargains, home of discount brands you know and discontinued brands the manufacturers would rather forget.

I go there quite a lot.

I was after olive oil, which I found easily and should have left it at that. But this kind of shop has a hold on me, and I end up walking around buying crap I know I do not need and probably will never use or, in the case of foodstuffs, eat.

Which brings me to the marshmallow-based sweet I bought today – faux fries!

I’ve seen the jelly burgers on many occasions, as I am sure has everyone else and haven’t ever felt the need to buy one. Not in years, anyway. But these fries had me in their grip with ease for one reason, and one reason alone; look at the image. Can you see?

That’s right – faux ketchup! It had to be a purchase, and so it was. Along with some toilet rolls. The nature of end of line foods is their unpredictable results when they interact with the human digestive system, so a good selection of toilet roll is an essential in my home.

The fries themselves were yellow and textured uncannily like real fries – a bit speckled and soft yet with a little resistance on chewing. The similarity ended there however, as despite their yellow colouring, they were strawberry flavoured. Clearly the manufacturers were taking serious risks here, already going against the food colours rules. Need a refresher?

Yellow is for banana, red is for strawberry and blue is for raspberry…for some reason.

You can’t play fast and loose with the rules and expect to get away with it. Clearly this was an omen of something bad yet to happen.

So now you can see the faux fries covered in the faux ketchup. The ketchup itself was just your standard strawberry syrup, the kind you would have had on an ice cream cone on many occasions, but with one crucial difference: this syrup was utterly, unspeakably vile.

The taste was nothing like strawberry, and it’s consistency too watery to adequately fulfil the sauce function. In fact the majority of it dripped out of the bottom of the packaging and onto my work surface.

And with that, it all went in the bin. The rather nice marshmallow fries were ruined by the vile sauce.

And that, I guess, is why the product may not be long for this world.

This incident lead to a comedy tour and DVD for popular comedian, Richard Herring. All well and good, but something similar happened to me the other day in top prole-food shop, Iceland, and it’s a very odd thing to experience.

I don’t mind it when it’s the checkout folk commenting on my purchases though; I’ve been in monotonous jobs where any off-script conversation is a key to a less miserable day - even now, not working in a shop I still have the same issue. So I have no problem with a staff member talking to me about what I’m buying. Except if it’s a special cream; I don’t really want someone in a pharmacy talking to me about how their pills cleared up a rash better than the cream. Which I didn’t have.

The cream or a rash. So shut up.

So I’ve established that I have no issues talking about my normal, everyday purchases with the staff. But I did get the same comment as Mr Herring did, “Someone likes yogurt”, except that this came from a random bloke in the queue in front of me.

I don’t like strange people striking up conversations; a quick comment is fine in itself, but this gentleman did want to talk. And I mean really talk; he offered me recommendations of great yogurts he’d eaten in the past, the prices he’d been charged for them, everything bar whether he licks the lid of the pot, or spoons the yogurt off it back into the pot.

Frankly, I was a little uncomfortable. As I mentioned, he was in front of me in the queue, and this meant that I could not turn around to avoid a conversation that my monosyllabic replies seemed to clearly indicate I wanted no part of.

Technically, yes, I could have turned around and looked the other way, but then I would look peculiar to the person behind me. They’d be wondering why I had suddenly decided to stare at them and they would be right to do so. And they might follow that thought through and from there they would think I might be readying myself to talk to them about their purchases. They wouldn’t be sure if I was a bit peculiar like the man in front of me, or if discussing your purchases with the person in front of you was a new policy that Iceland staff were encouraging in some way.

I think even if I had turned around this peculiar man would have carried on, perhaps tapping me on my shoulder now and then to make sure I was paying attention to him.

Yes, it was a lot of yogurts. Twelve of them. Twelve Muller Fruit Corners. But only in the form of two six packs for four pounds, which is a great deal.

It was odd, and it was making me laugh, because I’d read the events that Mr Herring had documented. His version was funny though.