Twice is Nice is my favourite newest discovery. I happened to stumble upon here on a lazy afternoon…read moreshopping with a friend. Now, to be fair, if I even so much sniff a second hand book I have sensors that flare and light up the room. I'm lassoed by an invisible rope that drags me toward it. I can't help but nosey around for a bargain. I was pleasantly surprised that there were actually some good books in here (note: some, most of them were rubbish) but this was juxtaposed alongside a funky range of second hand clothes, that were dirt cheap, probably the best prices I've seen in a shop. There's an array of teddies, ornaments, toys, shoes, a bike helmet (hopefully for a collector or decoration, but if anyone ever buys this I really hope they get a severe safety warning!) but just nosying round the memoirs of the past gives me a real sense of history and the charm of all these products being recycled makes me happy (I'm a tree hugging hippy, what else can I say?)

I'm a real book worm. I love a good book and can get through them like nobody's business. The only…read moreproblem now is that my house is coming down with them! Unless a book was particularly fantastic, I will only read it once, so for that reason, I don't like to spend an awful lot of money on them. I popped into Twice is Nice on the off chance, just to see if they had any books, as a lot of charity shops don't have a great range, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that they had lots! I found two books I hadn't got from a series of books I had been reading, and also picked up three good well known cookery books. Best of all, when I took them to the till, the whole lot only came to £6.75. I could easily have paid that for one of the books if I had bought it brand new!

Cartmills (synonymous with school wear) always reminds me of late August, the end of summer (cue…read morethe tears) and a blind panic to choose, fit and purchase those extortionately priced school uniforms we all had to wear. Cartmills made this job decidedly easy, minus the price bit. Not their fault I suppose, but why are uniforms so expensive? It just doesn't seem fair. To make it that little easier, the staff in this shop are old hands at this business. They could practically measure you up just by looking at you. This weirded me out a bit sometimes. Who knows what else they knew about if they could tell that much! But I can't really fault this place. They're good, no, sorry, great at what they do. It wasn't my favourite place to ever visit, but who could blame me, it meant going back to school, boo! They always know exactly which pieces of uniform you needed for what year and the sports kits and the rules and regulations regarding them. OK, it's not some where I'd want to go tomorrow, but it certainly is somewhere I know I'll always be able to trust.

My experience with Cartmills is pretty much the same as the other reviewers here. It reminds me of…read moreschool, a blazer that was two sizes too big ("you'll grow into it") and the colour brown for some reason. Cartmills used to be a full clothes shop, but propbably because of retirement and the crappy state of the economy, the only part that still trades is the school uniform. IT's expensive enough, but most uniforms are, so youcan't really fault them for that. The service is great,. I can see that now. As a child it was just annoying when they made you try on 13 different shirts to find the exact size you needed!

The Used Clothing Co buy old clothing and shoes for recycling. Basically, you bring them in your…read moreold clothes and shoes, they sort through them (to ensure that the items are in good enough condition and clean) They then weighed my bag, and gave me money based upon the weight. I'm not sure what they pay per kilo, but I had one large black bin liner full of clothes, and I got £4.55 I'm the sort of person who gets clothes all the time and easily get bored with them, so the clothes were fairly new and I would have been able to get a lot more for them if I'd listed them on eBay, but if you need stuff gone ASAP, it's a good option.

McMillan's is an old-fashioned newsagents, the kind of which are swiftly being killed off by…read morehorrible, all-consuming megacorporations. Tescos and Asda, pah. Apparently Google's motto is 'Do No Evil' - I wonder what Asda's is? Insert 'One day, the world will be MINE' gag here. Why do we, upon discovering that we have no bread, or fancy a rattle at the crossword, just pootle off to the nearest supermarket without a second's thought? McMillan's is a charming wee shop, the kind I once would have taken for granted. It's possibly the only place I'll buy a pre-made sandwich from - high praise indeed! I've bought a quarter pound of lemon bonbons here - I might be showing my age, but - balls to you, metric system! It's choc-a-bloc full of all the little things you might need on a daily basis, but chances are, it just wouldn't occur to you to pop in. Stop buying your paper in Tescos and go to McMillan's!

Northcott shopping centre is where joy comes to die, and that's not an exaggeration…read more It used to have some life about it, but not anymore. I suppose, to be fair to the place, it is in the process of some kind of redevelopment, although what exactly is happening, I'm not sure. I know that the Tescos that's there is expanding, but whether that means the end for the shops in there remains to be seen. For now, anyway, there really is only Tesco in there. There's also a pharmacy, which is handy, but on the whole, there isn't any way you would decide to kill a bit of time wandering around the shops at Northcott!

Sadly no longer with us…read more Northcott was where you went if the hustle and bustle of Abbeycentre wasn't your cup of tea. Originally anchored with a big (for the time) Stewarts supermarket (and the then-seperate due to legalities Wine Barrel off licence) for the weekly shop (including the environmentally friendly options of re-using boxes or the big car boot sized trolley liner). Big Primark a couple of doors down was Glengormley's answer to the Abbeycentre's Dunnes Stores. In between these were a toy shop that seemed to stock every single Britains die-cast farm toy, and had a good stock of lego. You then had Lifestyle and the NPO (pre-Easons), for flicking through the magazines. The bakery beside this used to be fairly busy, was like a little cafe, and opposite those were Ratner (pre-'crap' speech, later an H Samuel) and a Chemist and ornament shop which clinged on til the bitter end, their period fixtures, fans and signage viewable. A few doors down was Tandy, which was then *the* Commodore 64 game stockist. It was the Maplins of it's era. Other than that, in the main mall, was Superdrug and several shoe shops (including Tylers?). A cafe was present beside the main entrance, and at Christmas time a Santa's grotto was set up. Outside was a beauty salon, the only external premises. On the other side of the mall was the 'In Shops', a collection of independent traders (similar to the one on Belfast High Street). These included a hardware shop that sold vacuum bags for seemingly every single vacuum in the world! Externally, it was a typical 70s period modernist centre. Brick and metal on top, glassy entrance hall. The car park was huge, and even in it's heyday was rarely busier than 1/3 full! It included a few anomolies for road geeks, because of the one way system. Mainly the fact that to continue past the main entrance, you had to go the wrong way on the piece of dual carraigeway because the left hand side was a drop off zone. Also, before the Antrim Road link was built, the return from the main car park was one way (ending abruptly with no entry signs) but was still marked as the two way road. In later years the number of shops dwindled, the bigger stores moved to the competitor Abbeycentre, and the centre became a curiousity akin to experiencing a shopping centre in a Fallout / 28 Days Later setting. The Tesco was still handy if you needed a couple of items and didn't want to brave the ridiculously busy one beside the Abbeycentre.

This shop is aimed more at the older lady who still wants to look good. The clothes in here are…read moreclassic yet trendy pieces which wear well. Vogue sell an interesting range of pieces and I've found a couple of nice jewellery items in here. Admittedly I'm only ever in here if I'm at the Abbey Centre with my mum and she's looking for some new pieces so I don't personally shop in it myself, but from having a look around the clothes here aren't actually as bad as you would imagine. Now no, there not exactly my style, but give me another forty years and you never know! It's good at least that there are shops like these in the Centre and the shops aren't all completely aimed towards younger styles and trends.