It had a good innings – nobody can complain about a run of 856 years and it being curtailed; I remember when plans to demolish the 1960′s market and shopping centre area were being consulted on how most of the traders predicted the market wouldn’t survive, but – the soul having been ripped out of the place notwithstanding – most of the stalls made it through that redevelopment.

Then there are the current fears that the move of the Wholesale Markets from right next to the Bullring Market will cause major hassle – Jon Bounds has commented on the silliness of the image of traders wheeling trolleys full of cabbages half way across town half way through the trading day, but there’s the very real concern of how produce will be then transported, coupled with the new uncertainty surrounding when the move will actually happen.

But to me, what has finally killed the market is the combination of the serious drop in quality of the produce on sale, combined with the scourge of the man from the weights and the measures, the Poundabowl.

Now don’t get me entirely wrong – where the typical shopper might think more in terms of a number of items rather than a weight of items, there’s nothing wrong with it; but it still makes price comparisons difficult, because you don’t know how much you’re getting for your pound from different traders – you may well even be getting a different amount from the same trader each time you buy!

Until recently, produce from the market always tended to have what supermarket fruit and veg well and truly lacked – flavour. I still remember like it was yesterday my reintroduction to the market (after being horrified by reading Felicity Lawrence’s supermarket exposé, Not on the Label) and rediscovering that an onion is an actual real vegetable with a texture and a flavour, rather than some white thing which goes in the dinner for I’m-not-really-sure-what-it’s-adding. The market produce was the blemished, funny shaped stuff which the supermarket bland-o-matic rejected as being Not Possible To Bland.

But of late I’ve noticed that the flavour is less noticeably different from the supermarket, but more critically, the quality has gone right down the pan. It’s no use buying four or five peppers for a pound rather than three or four peppers for £1.50 if you only get to actually use two of them because the rest have become a putrifying blob of mush after a couple of days. I already decided a couple of weeks ago to stop getting my onions from the market because basically half of them were rotten even on the day I bought them.

Today, when I went to my usual stall for getting peppers, I was saddened to see they too have gone over to poundabowl. Rather than hand-picking the precise peppers I wanted (ie, the ones which looked the least off) I would have been forced to accept the ones in the bowl. I usually get a mix of colours, but these bowls were all monochrome – when I asked the assistant for a mix, her reply was “no, I’m not allowed to do that”. So I walked away and found another stall.

The other stall was also poundabowl, but at least when I asked if he could do a mix he said yes. When I checked in the bag to see how mixed he’d done it (just one red to five greens – I wanted three reds and three greens), I saw that two of the peppers were a putrifying blob of mush already.

If I can’t even rely on what I buy being of merchantable quality on the day I buy it, I’m not sure I can be bothered going all the way down there to buy in the first place. So for that reason, I’m out.

I have to admit I’m a little ambivalent as to whether or not I want to join in with the city outrage on the matter; on the one hand, indeed the factory is a Birmingham icon and too many Birmingham icons have been trashed in the last five years, 125 people will lose their jobs, and as a correct-thinking leftist liberal I of course should oppose all that is bad in Corporate Greed(tm).

On the other hand, the 125 people do have until next May to find new jobs (how many other people get the luxury of a full 12 month notice period of redundancy? When I was made redundant from Oakwood Village we were warned of the posssibility on the Friday, and then told to clear our desks on the following Monday), and as skilled workers will probably have little trouble finding replacement employment. And, the economics are clear – the factory as it is only operates a part-time week anyway, and since Heinz is, after all, a commercial entity with a need to make profits for the benefit of shareholders rather than an agency of the benefits service, it is a little difficult to blame them for wanting to combine production with a similar factory in the Netherlands which also only operates a part-time week – if one of the two factories has to go, what does make the Birmingham jobs more important than the Dutch jobs?

The story today is that HP Sauce’s long-time rival in the brown chip dressing department, Branston, is to launch a legal action to try to prevent HP from using the Houses of Parliament (after which the sauce is named) motif on the bottles once production moves, on the grounds that if the product is no longer British it will no longer have the right to use British imagery on the packaging.

The irony of this, of course, is that when the Aston factory closes, production of Lee & Perrins Worcester Sauce will return to its original factory in, erm, Worcestershire.

Last Tuesday evening from Spar I bought a box of Stowell’s Tempranillo (a light red wine, for those not in the know). I got it to the boat, poured a glass, and it turned out to be quite disgusting – a bottle of it I might have forced myself to drink, but a whole 3 litre box costing £18, I draw the line at; I’m not that much of an alcoholic. As well as being disgusting, in the glass it was cloudier than New Brighton beach on a wet sunday morning, and left a sediment in the glass worse than the Severn Trent sewage reprocessing plant. I’ve poured better home-brew down the sink.

Last Sunday afternoon I bought from Sainsbury’s supermarket in Selly Oak a bottle of chocolate schnapps (amongst other things). When I got home I went to open the bottle (a screw-top affair), and half the bottle came off along with the lid. Soon in the booze department, luck has been lacking this week.

This morning I took the box of wine back to Spar (when explaining the problem to the person behind the counter, one of the responses was “what’s sediment?”), and discovered in the process that it had a Best Before End date of July 2005. When the manager came out from the back of the shop he asked if I had the receipt – my answer was, naturally, “no, sorry – after all, do you keep the receipt for every bottle of wine you buy?”, and I pointed out that it was over a year past the BBE date. The manager said that without the receipt there was nothing he could do, so a bit of a discussion followed in which I mentioned the magic words “Trading Standards”, and he eventually went into the back room to look through the whole of Tuesday evening’s receipts to find the sale for the box of wine, and after 20 minutes came back having found the evidence of the sale (during which time I’d discovered another box of the same wine still for sale, also out of date) and grudgingly agreed to a refund.

This evening I took the bottle of schnapps back to Sainsbury’s, was asked if I had the receipt, and again my answer was, naturally, “no, sorry – after all, do you keep the receipt for every bottle of wine you buy?”.

“Good point, fair enough” was the reply – and the person behind the counter instantly went to the till and pulled out a refund in cash to give to me, without any further discussion.

Now, the man from Sainsbury’s could quite easily have argued with me on the grounds that, after all, from his point of view I could have broken the bottle myself accidently and tried to pass it off as faulty. So why did the man from Spar, when there was clear proof and evidence that the actual product wasn’t fit for sale, that it was out of date, and that there were more goods still for sale also out of date, decide to make an issue of it? And eventually lose the deal, waste half an hour of mine, his, and his assistant’s time, and leave a customer with a bad impression of the shop.