Here’s a mini guide to the best way of losing your money in Cardiff city centre, especially if you like buying the same things I do. (In fact if you don’t, this probably won’t interest you at all.)

The deadly triangle is that of Virgin Megastore, WHSmith, and HMV. None of the aforementioned places is cool or special in the senses that places where young people shop ought to be but they have two redeeming qualities: helluva lot of range and offers.

So what I do is (as I enter the city centre from north [don’t laugh, this is serious!]) pop into Virgin to check out their CD and DVD offers. Usually There’s a CD or two that are going for £5 or less. Last time I picked up Muse’s Showbiz and Garbage’s Version 2.0 for just that price, and my habit of scouring the bins for offers began when I found The Dandy Warhol’s Come Down there for just £3. After the ground floor has been secured, I pop upstairs for a quick look at the DVD’s. This time I ended up with Bottom’s 2001: An Arse Odyssey (which has got to have the highest fart joke quotient ever and is in every way a very very funny show) for just £8. The ”two for £20” offers are kinda hard to resist as the selection is quite large (I’m talking about Spring 2003, remember) but sometimes you just have to pull your reins in.

Then I move down the street and go into WHSmith which might be a corporate giant and a soulless bastard of a shop but they carry an amazing range of magazines (proper magazines too, not just glossies… which I don’t consider to be proper magazines anyhow) and quite nice book offers, especially on paperbacks. This time I sampled some new magazines (The Economist, The Ecologist, The Face, New Statesman) as well as ”old” favourites (Word, The New Yorker). It wasn’t actually cheap as the magazines usually cost something between 3 and 4 pounds, but I have to support my reading and would-be intellectual habit, now don’t I?

The last stop is at HMV. The best thing about HMV is that they have the same mid-price CDs as Virgin but the prices are sometimes a bit lower. For example, Leftfield’s Leftism was £5.99 at Virgin and £4.99 at HMV. It’s actually pretty easy to figure out what CDs are going to be available cheaper at the other store once you practice a bit. This time, however, I walked out with a Sinéad O’Connor double pack (The Lion and the Cobra + I do not want what I haven’t got, her two best albums [well actually they’re the only good ones]) for £9 and a couple of DVDs which I really shouldn’t have bought but did still (ie. Raging Bull and Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas for £20 – meaning that I had to drop Pi which would’ve cost only £8. Decisions, decisions…).

After completing this round I dare not take a look at the receipt slips as I’ve usually spent way too much money on non-essential things. It’s good fun, though.

There’s something troubling about the fact that Virgin Megastore has earplugs for sale at their listening posts which, incidentally, play music way too loud on headphones.

Another British (?) peculiarity: you can pay with a credit card at most of the charity shops (think kirpputori) but newsagents seem to only accept cash.