Well, what a disappointment. The Competition Commission appears to be living in a blissful parallel universe where Mr Cleaver the butcher and Mrs Large-Whyte, the baker, thrive on the same High Street as Sir Terry, the supermarket boss.

Well it ain't so. Not in London anyway. This paper has been overwhelmed with responses from ordinary Londoners who have lost much loved local traders since we launched our Save Our Small Shops campaign last March.

And one of the three or four most common recurring reasons given for closure is competition from new Tesco and Sainsbury's convenience stores.

Bizarrely, today's report provide plenty of factual ammunition to suggest that all is not well in British food retailing. Then concludes exactly the opposite. It is like a well drilled football team creating an open goal opportunity for its centre forward, who then deliberately misses because he prefers the score as it is.

In its 269 pages the report details how a nation of small shops has been supplanted by superstore Britain. In 1950 there were as many as 45,000 butchers and greengrocers. By 2000 there were just 10,000 - and presumably now a whole lot less.

It is worse in some parts of London. In my neck of the woods, Hammersmith W6, there were around 30 local butchers in the early Seventies, virtually one for every block. Now there is just one - the admirable Stenton's.

Tesco has had its eye on west London for many years. Historically this wealthy residential area has been Sainsbury's and Waitrose country with Tesco largely confined to its Brook Green and Warwick Road redoubts. But that has changed in the past five years with clusters of Express and Metro stores springing up throughout the area . A largish new Tesco is set to open near the Standard's offices on Kensington High Street any day now and the company is very keen to develop a superstore in Hammersmith.

You cannot help admiring Tesco. They just keep coming. Like Rasputin, they are virtually impossible to kill off - even when councils turn down their applications. Maybe Sir Terry is right. Perhaps it is just the 5 per cent of the chattering classes who raise their noses in their air and the other 95 per cent really do love them.

But that is not what our readers are saying. The Competition Commission today effectively gave a green light to supermarket growth. Indeed in some ways it said there should be far more. For those who value London's threatened retail biodiversity, these are worrying times.

The best pasties ever made were produced in the kitchen of my dear, late grandmother. End of story. No debate.

She lived in south Devon, but I grew up in Berkshire in the Seventies, so her pasties were only an occasional treat.

At that time the so called pasties produced in the south east were hideous apologies of the great West Country speciality - greasy parcels of flakey pastry filled with a salty goo of uncertain provenance.

So when the West Cornwall Pasty Company arrived in London a decade ago it was a cause of great celebration in my household at least.

Here was the real thing, filled with great chunks of steak, potato and swede all wrapped in a properly "crimped" pastry shell. It may not have been quite up to my grandmother's sublime standards, but it was pretty close.

My fellow Londoners obviously agreed because those little black and yellow kiosks seemed to spring up everywhere.

It was with concern, therefore, that I overheard one of my colleagues complain last week about the lack of steak in his "large" traditional pasty from our local outlet in Kensington High Street. As soon as he said it, I realised I had noticed it too.

Could the West Cornwall Pasty Company, which started with such high standards, be suffering the same fate as virtually every other food concept that decided to go big?

It is a familar process. I've seen it all too often. As the chain expands, and the original owners look to a possible sale of their business, little corners are cut here and there to boost the margin. Look at Pizza Express, which reduced the size of its pizza (now happily restored) and Cafe Rouge, where savage cost cutting eventually left it a sad pastiche of a pastiche.

In the case of the pasties it might only be a relatively minor tweak to the recipe, replacing expensive steak with a little more potato, swede and onion, for example. Accountants will say the consumer won't notice the difference. But they do.

I hope I'm wrong. But I must say I was not surprised to see that the West Cornwall Pasty Company was sold to a private equity buyer for £40 million earlier this month. Honestly, those private equity sharks. They may know all that's worth knowing about realising value, exit strategies and boosting shareholder returns. But when it comes to making a top pasty, I'm sorry, but grandmother knows best.

ps Am I the only person in London who pronounces pasty the south Devon way with a long 'a' and a touch of 'r' as in car? Everyone here seems to prefer the short 'a' as in pasta. My colleagues laugh at my 'affectation'. Surely there are fellow travellers out there.

My brother-in-law has a theory. Infact, he has a lot of theories, but let's stick with the matter in hand.

He is certain that more "short pints" - glasses not quite full to the brim - are being served in London than ever before.

He puts it down to the changing demography of bar staff in the capital's pubs. A decade or so ago - he argues - most bar staff in London used to be, as it were, "imperial".

That is they were drawn from Commonwealth countries such as Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. They were more familiar with the Anglo-Saxon model of the pint swilling over the top of the glass.

But now bar staff are predominantly "metric" - that is from Continental European countries, particularly from Eastern Europe.

On the continent, unlike the UK, most beer glasses come with a line near the top indicating how much liquid should be poured in. As a result Polish, Russian or Czech bar staff habitually tend to stop pouring when the froth has reached the top, inadvertently short changing the customer.

It's an intriguing theory, but I'm not sure.

I wonder if it as much to do with the changing economics of the pub industry. Most pubs in London are now part of vast chains often owned by private equity finance houses. The only role in life for these organisations is to ensure a better return to their investors than they could get in the Stock Market. That translates into huge pressure on managers to cut costs and maximise profits.

One easy way of doing that is to trim back on training, so that the basics of running a bar and serving drinks are not properly imparted. Another is to reduce the number of bar staff. This means they do not have time to "top up" the pint when serving because of the intense time pressure they are under from thirsty punters.

Thirdly, and more controversially, is it possible that staff are actually encouraged to include the froth as part of the pint?

If bar staff are serving, say, 18 fluid ounces instead of 20 each time they pour out a pint then the pub - and ultimately its private equity owners - are getting a free pint for every ten served. And at £3 a pint in London, that matters.

I think the jury is still out on this one. More research needed I feel.

Call me a sad statto - and many do - but the tax man's website is an absolute mine of information about what we pay the Government.

In the last few days the Revenue people have slipped out the latest figures on property stamp duty. I can see why they are not exactly falling over themselves to draw attention to it.

Last year the Treasury made £1.725 billion in stamp duty from residential property in London alone, up by a third in a year. This has to be the fastest growing of all the mainstream taxes and imposts.

The tax man loves it. Stamp duty costs almost nothing to collect and the yield rises much faster than inflation, faster even than property prices. The reason is the bizarre and iniquitous structure of the tax, which means that if you go just £1 over the threshold you pay the higher rate on the whole purchase price.

So, for example, someone paying £250,000 for a house pays 1 per cent, or £2,500. But add £1 to the price and the stamp duty bill goes up to £7,500 - or 3 per cent. Which is why of course you get hardly any properties priced in the £250,000 to £280,000 bracket.

This makes stamp duty - inevitably introduced to pay for a war with France - different from almost any other banded tax. Take income tax, or this week's "hot" fiscal measure - inheritance tax. You only pay the higher rate on the amount that your income - or estate - exceeds the threshold.

Surely the obvious way of taking the sting out stamp duty is to make the rates "marginal" in the same way? That would take much of the sting out of the "property ladder" tax.

Of course, few people are going to feel sorry for London property owners. On the deprivation scale we are not the most deserving of causes. But stamp duty has distorted the market. It means you are much less likely to move, stifling the supply of homes onto the market and helping to squeeze up the general level of prices. That does have a genuine knock-on effect for society as a whole.