They have their faults, but superstores have made our lives much more exciting. Supermarkets are taking over the world - but would we really have it any other way?

Tesco has just made record profits. They get £1 from every £8 spent by British consumers. Supermarkets have changed the High Street and seen off butchers, bakers, post offices, grocers and chemists. Some of them even hold weddings.

It's a long way from the corner shop - and frankly, I wouldn't like to go back to it.

Of course, these days we still have small specialist shops, some of them selling amazing produce. They do a wonderful job and deserve lots and lots of our money.

But they're the ones who've survived, reinvented themselves or been newly created. Many of those who haven't aren't necessarily a great loss.

Cast your mind back to the days BS - before supermarkets, somewhere around the 1950s. The world of Open All Hours. Remember what it was like?

Boring, that's what.

It was a time when a few sausages in a tin of baked beans counted as exotic food. Our local grocer sold wonderful home-cured ham and bacon. But just two sorts of cheese - strong mousetrap and mild mousetrap. No real coffee, no pasta, no fresh soups, no croissants, no olive oil, no curry spices - apart from one all purpose "curry powder". The list of things they didn't stock would fill this page. Choice was non existent - you got what he stocked and as he only had a stock room the size of the average garage, that wasn't much.

As for greengrocers... yes of course, it's wonderful to have local fruit and vegetable in season - but apart from a few Dutch tomatoes and New Zealand apples, that's pretty well all we had - which meant by this time of year we would have been living on last autumn's soft apples, wormy potatoes, hairy carrots and looking forward desperately to the year's first rhubarb. Salad in winter? You must be joking.

Green peppers were exotic. Chicken was a treat and yoghurt was something eaten by cranky middle class socialists.

And booze... the bigger grocers would have a few token bottles of something up on a high shelf. Otherwise the posh ordered from their wine merchants and the poor took a jug of beer home from the pub. It was the supermarkets who turned us into wine drinkers, who encouraged us to try the cheap and cheerful until we discovered we had quite a taste for it.

So yes, supermarkets are getting too big for their boots. And yes, we need to know what they're up to as we contribute even more to their massive profits. But go back to the old days? No thank you.

What's wrong with M&S, chapter 38...

LAST week popped into Middlesbrough looking for a couple of thin jumpers, nothing flash, just summer basics. In that vast M&S store they had precisely two, neither of which I liked.

Ah well, get some tights. Nope. No 20 denier tights in my size.

"Last week we didn't have any Small ones," said the assistant. This was meant to console me? So I mooched down to the food hall and thought I would stock up on what M&S still do well. I already had some other shopping so I needed a trolley. Guess what? No trolleys.

"He's gone to get some," said an assistant. Goodness knows where he'd gone but I gave up waiting for him to come back.

Instead, I bought my tights and my food in Tesco. There's a lesson there.

Maybe I'll go back and look at their jumpers too.

NURSE" is a wonderful word. It conjures up images of care and cherishing, of lavishing attention on someone as if they were as helpless and needy as a tiny baby.

And when we are ever in that state of helplessness - as we all are occasionally - it is just wonderfully reassuring to give yourself up to the care of a nurse. The sort of calm and wonderful person who can deal with all the undignified messiness of illness and still make you feel like a human being - which is, after all, the first step to recovery.

But not any more. Next month the Royal College of Nursing will debate a resolution that: "The caring component of nursing should be devolved to healthcare assistants, to enable registered nurses to concentrate on treatment and technical nursing."

Oh dear.

Yes, of course nursing has changed. It is now much more high tech and complicated. Nurses have degrees, deal with sophisticated drugs and machinery and do much more than put a cool hand on a fevered brow and so need the appropriate brains and education.

Maybe you don't need a degree to hold a bowl for a vomiting patients... to give someone a bath... to spoonfeed them their lunch.... to help them use a bedpan without a shred of embarrassment. Or in the early hours of the morning just to sit, talking calmly, holding a patent's hand and keeping their fear and panic under control.

But those are the sort of things that we remember nurses for and for which we are generally pathetically grateful.

So yes, fine, split the nursing career if you like between the high tech experts and caring comforters. But let the high tech ones have the new names - Healthcare Practitioners or something equally grand and technical.

Then the person who looks after your most basic needs, makes you comfortable and calms your fears in the nightmarish early hours can still be called a nurse. Because for most of is, that is what nursing is all about.

IN an interview with The Times, Kate Winslet says, having just polished off a slice of apple tart, "I have nothing against people who are thin... But I am not like that and don't want to be."

The piece is accompanied by a picture of Kate looking slender and stunning - which makes me think that her definition of "thin" is not quite the same as that of the rest of us...

Published: 28/04/2004