Use ’em, don’t lose ’em. The UK’s biggest food retailer has a branch in Cowley Road. I am proud not to have entered it in three years.

My wife occasionally goes to buy things “you simply can’t get” in the smaller shops, though thankfully she tends to save me from knowledge of this peccadillo.

Why? Because I prefer to give my money to Amit and Ajay the newsagents, or to the Classic deli, or to the Co-op, than to some faceless multi-national.

With electronics, I am less scrupulous. In the absence of a good local shop, I buy online. But for me, and apparently for thousands of other internet-savvy locals, the shop-local principle very much applies to bike shops.

Bike shops have been hard pressed this winter, as the cost of steel and rubber has gone through the roof. For 20 years, inner tubes have cost £3.50. Suddenly they’re a fiver. But the shops are still busy and Jason, who manages Beeline Bikes, is relaxed.

Historically, he reckons bike shops have been fairly recession-proof.

In the good times, we’ll splash out on a sexy Specialized Langster. In the hard times, petrol price hikes and the weekly bus fares will lead us to that most obvious of choices: I’ll cycle!

You can buy bike gear cheaper online, but I always get mine in a bike shop. Bike shops are to me like sweets shops are to a kid.

I like Jason at Beeline Bikes. Nasser from Cyclo-Analysts is cool. I hang out with Dan and James from Oxford Cycle Workshop. My network even extends to Stuart from Summertown Cycles, and Steve at Warlands, in Botley Road.

Partly because of the “use ’em, don’t lose ’em” idea – who wants a high street full of Cost-a-community coffee emporia and Tax-the-poor betting shops?

But there’s also a more practical side to it than that. You really do get a top, personal service in Oxford’s bike shops. Plus they are very much part of that make-do-and-mend movement. Bikes can be fixed and fixed again much more cheaply and for far longer than any four-wheeled beast. Bikes, that is, but not bike accessories.

I was wearing an Altura jacket that I’d only had a couple of months. On the chillest wintry day last week, the puller on the front zip came straight off in my hand. I took it back to Beeline to get it mended.

Altura’s distributor didn’t want to touch it. Rather than fix this tiny defect, they preferred to chuck away the nearly-new £80 jacket and give me a brand new one. Jason and I shook our heads.

Were it well-used, I would make do and mend it myself. But you can’t allow a penny-pinching manufacturer to sell you a substandard £80 jacket that you then have to use for five more years with a modified paper clip for a puller, so I accepted their stupid offer.

I’ll write and complain, for what it’s worth. But it’s the sad way of this messed-up capitalist jungle.

While travelling for a year in south-east Asia, my wife and I were constantly struck by the ingenious ways in which machines and vehicles were constantly kept alive. Bangkok has entire districts dedicated to coil-rewinding and gearbox reconditioning.

Oh, for a zip-fixing cottage industry in the UK. There is so much more to save.