Carpenters Convenience Store

I love Carpenters Convenience Store because it’s just a little bit mad. The signage states that ‘genuine Irish products’ are available in store, so, ever hopeful that expectations mirror the hype, I called in for some soda bread, only to find that they didn’t… again! All they had were some peculiar looking packet soups that were clearly not an English brand, and that was it on the genuine Irish products front as far as I could tell. But to apply some kind of weird logic to the situation, this is a result in itself. It’s okay if it makes you smile!
The fact that the shop was acquired by a Pakistani family more than fifteen years ago may have something to do with the scant Irish stock. But bless ‘em, they retained the Irish name for the business and have genuinely endeavoured to carry on supplying the Irish community with homespun comfort food ever since. God love ‘em (and all the Saints preserve us…)
Carpenters Convenience Store is otherwise a perfectly normal shop selling all the things that you’d hope a convenience store would stock, including booze, bread, eggs and tomato ketchup. They have a cash machine too. Pretty useful for a city that seems to have so few!