Sex with your sun-dried tomatoes, sir?

THERE IS one area of trade where you could have been forgiven for assuming that the traditional high street still had the modern supermarket chains licked.

True, the big foodstores have moved in on the territory of the delicatessens, the bakeries, the fishmongers and even the banks, but that corner patch marked out by the friendly local prostitute has always seemed pretty secure.

Yet this week an experiment with 24-hour opening at a North London branch of Budgens has been prematurely curtailed due to the unsavoury transactions going on in its aisles. Prostitutes, according to the store's manager, had been spotted offering their services in return for baskets of groceries.

"It was obvious they were ladies of the night," Dave Huggett, the manager, told the local press. "They would come in with their minders. It as a nightmare for the staff." It is not clear whether the women concerned were going so far as to specify to the punters the kind of goods they wanted but - developing the food/sex equation - Mr Huggett went on to say: "Some offered it on a plate in return for the goods."

Budgens has quickly reassessed the opening hours of the store, which is situated in Crouch End - a strong candidate for the London suburb name with the best double entendre readily at its disposal.

After only six weeks, the 24-hour shopping experiment was stopped and the store has reverted to a midnight closing time. It seems it was the twilight hours that were causing the problem.

"We are getting too many undesirables," said Mr Huggett. "It's a shame, but we weren't getting the right sort of customer."

Budgens' headquarters was not prepared to comment on the quality of the nocturnal customer at Crouch End. A spokesman preferred instead to emphasise the difficulty the supermarket experienced in attracting high numbers throughout the night.

"The trouble was, there were just not enough people coming into our store on The Broadway in Crouch End to make it worthwhile," he said. "And it can be a rough area at that time anyway."

Not "rough", surely? The branch is surrounded by ethnic gift shops, bookshops and second-hand pine furniture dealers.

Perhaps Budgens were carried away by the seedy associations of the term "Broadway". The lyric "they say the neon lights are bright on Broadway" was certainly never meant to apply to the N8 postal area. As for "the glitter rubbing off .... When you ain't got enough to eat," Budgens does seem to have seen to that one by simply shutting up shop.

Of course, staff employed to work around the clock in convenience stores and supermarkets all over the country have had to develop a fairly tough attitude to life. They are repeatedly exposed to the seamier side of the seamier side.

Drunks and thieves are the recurrent problems. But Mohamed Mubarak, the deputy manager of a 24-hour supermarket in Tottenham Court Road, finds amorous clubbers are another common feature of his work.

"Young girls and boys come in after the clubs close to buy sandwiches and bottles of water and, if it is cold outside, they sometimes stay for a long time, kissing and things." But Mohamed says he does not mind. In his book the customer is always right and he and his staff are often grateful for the company.

Balfour, the night-time manager at a rival Europa store in the West End, comes across the same sort of romantic entanglements by his chilled cabinets, but as he rather jadedly points out: "It is very hard to tell these days if a woman is a prostitute, the way they dress for the clubs. I would not like to say anything to someone in case I was wrong."

Both managers admit, however, to drawing a strict line when it comes to access to the staff toilet. Each night a procession of courting night owls will ask if they can use the loo for unspecified reasons.

"I don't know what other managers do, but I just say no to it," said Balfour. "You don't know what people are going to do, or whether they even have drugs with them on the premises."

In Crouch End, predictably, things were more sophisticated, in a North London kind-of-a-way. Let's face it, a prostitute who is prepared to sleep with a man for an aubergine, a foccaccia loaf and some sun-dried tomatoes is playing a different sort of game altogether. Needless to say, staff at this branch did not catch anyone in flagrante by the flageolet beans.

It must still rate as a relatively risky and public way to pick up a prostitute, though. One would have thought that, compared to the embarrassment of passing through the check-out with a newly-acquired hooker, the time honoured blushes of lone men facing sneering cashiers with comedy items such as haemorrhoid ointment, pale into insignificance.

Perhaps it was the blatant inappropriateness of the venue that provided the thrill. Tom, a painter living in Hampstead thinks so. He regularly works through the night and as a result he sometimes ends up visiting a 24-hour supermarket at around three or four in the morning.

"At that time, which really is the absolute dead of the night, these supermarkets are slightly sexually-charged places," he observes. "You can't help noticing the other people there and wondering. It is the same thing with libraries."

In the end, the hookers of Crouch End were really just getting back to basics and cutting out the middleman. Why waste time with a shopping trolley when you can get your client to do it for you?

The penguins who were memorably discovered selling sex in the Antarctic this February have a set of equally admirable, pared-down principles.

Scientists observing colonies of Adelie penguins living about 800 miles from the South pole noticed that the female birds were slipping away from their partners to visit the nests of unpaired males. After a brief courtship, they mated, and then left with the payment of a valuable rock with which to fortify.