Feels like all the high street trades in nowadays is fear

In these dying days of the high street, when so many traditional family-run shops are closing down, it’s a rare treat to come across the premises of a good old-fashioned trader. Imagine my delight when I spotted a sign above a shop the other day, saying, in elegant lettering, “HJ Lovejoy & Sons, Scaremongers. Purveyors of Trepidation Since the Year of the Millennium Bug.”

As I entered, it was oddly reassuring to hear the tinkle of the bell at the top of the door. The man behind the counter, who was wearing a surgical mask, called out: “Take care! The floor could collapse at any moment. Termites.” This was Mr Lovejoy himself. “If you’ve come for a stabproof vest, you’re out of luck,” he said. “There’s been a run on them.” “Why the mask?” I asked. “Diphtheria is rife,” he explained. “It’s cutting a swathe through the country, but the NHS is hushing it up. The authorities don’t want it to distract attention from their war on obesity.”

Mr Lovejoy said that he had started out as an ironmonger, but he soon lost interest in mops and buckets and mousetraps. He thought of being a fishmonger, but then decided that the world would be down to its last mackerel in a couple of years. The scare business, however, is booming. Touch wood.

There was a charming clutter of goods on the shelves. Every possible variety of fire extinguisher, distress rockets, inflatable rafts, high-viz jackets and pepper sprays. “The killer hornet repellent has been selling well,” Mr Lovejoy said. “Trouble is, it’s an aerosol, so you can’t use it, because of the ozone layer, but you can give the hornet a good old whack with the can. And we don’t sell plastic – except for these plastic bags which are for ramming down the throats of sharks when they attack you.”

As I opened the door to leave the shop, the tinkly bell fell on to my head. “You should have worn a helmet,” Mr Lovejoy called after me.

Last year, our holiday on the lovely little island of Dyspepsia was rather spoiled, because my wife and I were so worried about buying presents for people back at home. It’s important not to get corny souvenirs, and something from duty-free is a sure sign of defeat.

So we missed out on the ruins of the monastery and also the olive museum, and we didn’t make it to the festival of the blessing of the goats because we were so busy hunting for little gifts for my wife’s hairdresser, and for the neighbours, who were popping in to keep an eye on our houseplants and watering our cat. Most importantly, we had to get something really original for the Wilkinsons who, the previous year, had brought us back a nose flute from their holiday on Myopia.

This time we won’t have this problem. I’ve discovered a fantastic app called Thought You Might Like. Just type in your holiday destination and you get sent a list of appropriate local artefacts, tick the ones you want and they are delivered even before you set off.

We are going to unspoilt Neuralgia this summer, reassured in the knowledge that we already have a bottle of a yellowish liqueur with the twig in it, a colourful coarse-

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion knitted smock, as worn by the older village women, a naive painting on wood of Sciatica, a hermit and saint, and some of those crumbly biscuits which are supposed to be a local delicacy but you never see anyone eating. Not forgetting the CD of Neuralgian folk songs by the hugely popular local boy, Milos Fibrositis. Why do oranges have to be orange? It’s so predictable and it’s becom becoming a cliché. If you go into M&S you ca can buy tomatoes that are orange, green, almost black, or stripy. They have y yellow and purple carrots comin coming out of their ears, and now they are very proud of their pink “wa “watermelon” radishes.

S So what about oranges? Wake up M& M&S! Surely you could come up wi with some multicoloured stripes, or a Black Watch tartan. I would set settle for a blue orange. And if it’s po possible to get so many people exc excited about the windy radish just by m making it pink, surely M&S could rehab rehabilitate the honest swede and turn it into the must-have root vegeta vegetable. All you need is polka dots.