I don’t understand who would rummage through their local clothes dump Zara store for the pleasure of spending £9 and 99 tiny pence for a screwed up, thrown on the floor piece of clothing. However, Inditex’s bulletproof financial performance proves that lots of people do! Mystifying!

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the seemingly unstoppable spread of Costa Express machines. Today, I thought I’d throw caution to the wind, and – against my better judgement – try a hot chocolate produced by one of these machines.

My previous experience of machine-produced hot beverages has been dominated by overpriced and undrinkable rubbish from hospital vending machines. I’m not quite sure what I expected from this Costa machine: Something resembling coffee shop hot chocolate? Something undrinkable? Something inbetween?

As I pressed the button for a Costa hot chocolate, the one thing I didn’t expect was a cup of warm milk… yet that’s what I got! Not a drop of chocolate in sight! My faith in machine-crafted hot drinks isn’t exactly restored…!

Hartlepool’s Middleton Grange Shopping Centre used to be home to a Co-op department store, but the shop closed in October last year. However, in a somewhat bizarre state of affairs, the coffee shop it contained remains open. To access the coffee shop, one must walk through the empty department store.

This surely makes Eugene’s one of the strangest coffee shops in Hartlepool, if not the UK. As coffee shop locations go, the back of an empty department store is hardly the most obvious or everyday choice! Despite this, it did appear to be pulling in customers – certainly far more so than the almost deserted Esquires in a more conventional mall spot!

Quite what will happen to Eugene’s when the Co-op store is ultimately let to new tenants remains to be seen.

Abandoned buildings always pique my interest: I always wonder what’s inside, and quite often find myself looking, with fascination, at the blogs and forums of urban explorers.

This gym is just round the corner from the halls I lived in during my first year at uni. Back then (2003), this gym seemed popular, and the car park was often busy. Clearly, somewhere along the line, something went wrong: it’s now an abandoned and increasingly dilapidated site. This seems bizarre given that it’s part of the thriving Teesside Retail Park, where new buildings are being added all the time. Why hasn’t this one been refurbished? Why hasn’t it been flattened and some much-needed car park spaces added? What went wrong? And what’s left inside?

All interesting questions… though the answers are no doubt prosaic!

This Costa Express machine is in my local Asda, but they’re spreading all over the place at the moment. When they were first announced, I ridiculed the idea: Costa, Britain’s biggest coffee chain, had just spent a whole heap of money on ads to convince us that their coffee was different because it was made by highly trained baristas, not monkeys with machines. Then they decide to brand, erm, machines. It didn’t make sense to me.

But it turns out that I was wrong. I recently read that these machines have been doing a roaring trade, and sales have soared in places where they’ve displaced other machine brands. Which just goes to show that I know nothing about retail branding!

Last week, Wendy needed something posting quickly, so I took it to the local Post Office and coughed up £7.55 to send it via Special Delivery, expecting it to arrive the next working day.

Unfortunately, on this occasion, Royal Mail’s definition of “special” fell short of both my expectations and their service specification: it took almost a week. Their website clearly reports the postage and delivery date.

So given that Royal Mail know from their tracking system that the item was delayed, claiming the refund to which I’m entitled should be straightforward, right? Sadly not. It turns out that I have to fill in a form giving all sorts of details about the parcel, including the posting and delivery dates and times which they clearly already know, and submit this along with my original Post Office receipts (luckily, I’m a hoarder of Post Office receipts after previous bad experiences). I then have to wait 30 days – thirty days – for them to consider the claim, when it is already abundantly clear from the data they have that a refund is appropriate.

Why can’t I just go to the local Post Office, or phone a number, and get an immediate apology and refund based on the data they already have? The current system seems convoluted, illogical, and puts a totally unnecessary burden on the consumer. Rant over!

This is our local Tesco in Kingston Park. With 119,000 square feet of retail space, it was once Britain’s biggest hypermarket. Unusually for a modern hypermarket, the retail space is almost exclusively on one level, with only the cafe being upstairs (above non-retail space, rather than as a fashionable and rent-reducing mezzanine). It has a number of concessions inside, including a Johnson’s dry cleaners, a Card Factory, a Co-op Travel Agent, and several more besides.

It is really a bit too big, the size rather getting in the way of a pleasant shopping experience. Staff used to zoom around on roller skates, though I haven’t seen them doing that for a little while. That said, I relatively rarely venture in these days. I can’t remember the last time Wendy and I did a big shop there. It’s big, busy, tatty, dirty, unfriendly, and altogether quite unpleasant.

In 2010, Tesco opened a store at Walkden in Salford thats about 50% bigger. I’ve no idea how they fill the space, and I struggle to imagine how the extended pain of pushing a trolley 50% further is met with commensurate benefits… I don’t plan to go and find out!

Meet Jolly, one of the many cardboard cutout corgis currently littering the Metrocentre. This is, surely, one of the country’s strangest Diamond Jubilee celebrations…!

At the Metrocentre this evening, I did have to wonder: is there some kind of celebration happening this weekend?!

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know that Wendy and I were evacuated from the Handmade Burger Company at the Metrocentre tonight after our meal was rudely interrupted by the restaurant setting on fire…!

One of the downsides of the open kitchen is that the flames were quite clearly visible. Initially, we were told to ignore them, as the gas had been turned off and they’d soon subside. But we were warned that our chips might be delayed.

As the flames persisted, the chef produced a fire extinguisher, which also failed to extinguish the flames.

We were reassured that everything was fine, even as the fire alarms were blaring… it was only when the sprinklers started that the staff decided the time was right for an evacuation… of the whole centre. We didn’t even get our chips!

The picture shows the fire engine that came to the rescue. There may have been more than one, but Wendy and I walked across to the McDonalds on the nearby retail park as soon as we were out – we were hungry!

I guess you could say that our whole evening was flame-grilled, not just out burgers!