IT WAS a Friday. Better than that, it was the Friday after payday.

Not only that, it was Dress Down Friday, which has moved on from its roots as the day when the boss would tell his employees off in front of everybody, to a day when one can come into work IN ONE’S OWN CLOTHES, ie, jeans.

No wonder I was feeling festive.

And, feeling festive, I decided that I would treat myself to posh sandwiches. Because I’m worth it, I thought.

I walked into the posh sandwich shop in my jeans, feeling like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman when she first goes to Rodeo Drive.

But I didn’t care, because I knew I could pay for ANY sandwich in the shop.

I walked up to the serving counter. A vast array of sandwich ingredients faced me. Think of a sandwich, dear reader. I could have had it.

“Chicken and bacon, please,” I asked. I know I could have got that anywhere, but I lost my nerve. 

The assistant assembled the ingredients. My mouth was watering. This was going to be the best chicken and bacon sandwich I had ever had.

Then . . . “Do you want any salad?”

“Noooo!” my brain cried. I do understand the point of lettuce, but will never truly love it. Salad dressing is the equivalent of the bit on Big Cook Little Cook where the mismatched chefs sing a song while washing up in a doomed attempt to make it fun. It’s not fun, it’s just necessary.

“Bit of lettuce, please,” I said. One down, four to go, I thought.

She handed me my sandwich and my little slip and I joined the queue to pay. Salad was a small setback, but I wasn’t going to let it get me down.

Then it happened.

There were only two cashiers working. I was standing equidistant from each of them. They were both serving customers. But, crucially, they finished serving them AT THE SAME TIME.

The cashiers looked at me. I looked at the cashiers. And time slowed down as my mind raced. I had to choose between them and we all knew it.

Who would I go for? One of them would be crushed, and by that I mean slightly miffed. Why had I been put in this position? I just wanted a sandwich. Maybe I could flip a coin, would that be too obvious?

I looked at the two women. One was an older lady, like the dinner ladies of my childhood. The other was a young woman.

It would be cruel to call this woman plain. And, yes, I am aware that those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones – although they can grow tomatoes in their living room, swings and roundabouts, etc.

So I shall say she had niche appeal. In any case, the only thing I was interested in was my sandwich. I think of sandwiches roughly 19 times a day, and I think that’s enough to be going on with.

Had she been considerably more pulchritudinous than her older colleague, I would have gone to the older woman. Chivalry is my middle name.* But she was not.

However, as I looked down, I noted that I was standing left foot forward. And the young woman was on the left. I made my choice.

As I walked over to the young woman, paying for my sandwich, her colleague said: “Ooh, I see. Go for the pretty young one, will ye?”

My mind was on fire, as were my cheeks. I had hurt this nice lady. I didn’t have time to think. If I had given it a second’s thought, I would have come up with a hundred better things to say, but the words burst out before I could stop them.

“God, no! I don’t fancy her at all!”

Everything stopped for a moment. Then the young woman flung my sandwich into a paper bag, slammed my change into my hand and shouted: “Next!”

I will never be able to go back there. Never. It was a lovely sandwich, though.

(*It’s not. It’s Edward.)

“HULLO?” inquired the Scot on the other end of my phone. “Hello,” I replied, in my English accent.

“Can I speak to Mr Bainbridge, please?” Could he?!? I should cocoa! Nobody ever phones my house wanting to speak to me. This would be a rare treat. For him, too, I imagine.

“Speaking.”

“I’m calling on behalf of Madeupname-toavoidlegalgrief Broadband. Would you like to reduce your broadband bill with us from £19 to £12 a month?”

There’s no way there could be a catch in that, I thought. “Yes, please,” I said immediately.

This was a weight off my mind, to be honest. Madeupnametoavoidlegalgrief had phoned a week before to suggest I might want to continue using their services. I told them I wanted to shop around to see what the other broadband operators had to offer. But when I investigated, it seemed that everybody hated their own broadband operator at least as much as I did.

Kylie is right, I thought. Better the devil you know, I thought. Everybody would be happy with this arrangement, I thought. I was, of course, wrong.

You see, Cameron – as I will be referring to my caller – had a script to deal with resistant customers, one which my immediate capitulation had rendered obsolete. And there was no way he was going to fly blind and deviate from that script. After all, he’d seen on Facebook what happened to the last guy in his call centre who improvised . . .

– Ewan McDougall sneaked an xtra gd mrng into script no. 4. lol

– Ewan McDougall just found a new word for Snow on Inuit Wars.

– Ewan McDougall is being summarily executed for use of unauthorised “good morning”.’ 😦

“We have noticed that you do not use the extra phone line. We can give you a reduction to £12 if we remove that facility.”

“Yeah, I know. I’ve just said, I want it.”

“And the speed package goes up to 20 meg . . . ”

“Yes, yes, I want it. Let me have it. Please let me have it.”

“I’m testing your line now . . . Your line can take up to 10 meg.”

“Right, £12 a month. Ace,” I said. “Hang on, only 10 meg? No, no, go on. Sign me up.”

“And this is an 18-month contract. Right, Mr Bainbridge, if you could just confirm the first and third letter of your Madeupname-toavoidlegalgrief password.”

What? Eighteen-month contract? Hadn’t he seen the news? There might not even be computers in 18 months. My head was swimming. How could I possibly be expected to give Cameron the third letter of my password?

“O and G,” I said.

“Sorry, sir, could you repeat that?”

“No, wait! O and Y!” In my confusion I had become either dyslexic or innumerate.

Cameron, through his insistence on maintaining his script, had turned me from a definite into a maybe. He wasn’t a salesman, he was an anti-salesman. I mean, why should I pay for 10 meg access the same price as somebody who gets 20 meg?

And then it occurred to me.

Madeupnametoavoidlegalgrief had been happily taking £19 off me every month for the past three years, £7 of which had been for a service which they knew I hadn’t used and was never going to use. I bet they’d all been laughing at me for years. Cameron probably won a raffle to be the one who’d get to call “Bainbridge The Idiot,” as I am no doubt known.

I changed my mind. Too late. “Thank you, Mr Bainbridge. Your details have been changed. Goodbye. CLICK. Brrrrrrrrr…”

Ah well, I’m sure there might be better deals around, but the fact is I can’t find the box my broadband router came in. I’d happily endure slightly rubbish internet access for another 18 months to avoid the embarrassment of having to post the router back without its proper box.

So, in the end, I suppose I’m a winner. But I don’t think I’ll ever answer the phone again.

ZOOLOGY was never my strong suit. Actually, I don’t even have a strong suit, nor do I have any idea what one is. All I know is that I know little about animals and their ways.

Either way, I don’t believe I actually saw a snail until I was in my twenties. I was aware of what they looked like, of course. I’d seen pictures. But I could say that about a hippopotamus or a unicorn or a Conservative voter. I was a city boy, with a yard, not a garden.

My life these days is very different with regard to snail exposure. Only the other night, I was dragging out the wheelie bin ready for the morning’s collection, when I found one of the little fellows sitting upon the lid.

Many of his comrades- in-shells have met a premature end at my hands, or, to be strictly accurate, feet. There’s little more unexpectedly unpleasant then hearing a crunch under foot as one dashes out late at night to take out the rubbish. Especially if one is wearing slippers.

It was clear, then, that Bin-lid Snail was one of the lucky ones. I looked him in the eye, regarded the twitch of his horns, the patina of his shell, and I told him: “Get your skates on, pal. The binmen are coming in eight hours.”

Perhaps it’s the cuteness of the snail’s shell, but I would never have extended the same courtesy to a slug. This is odd. Were I to meet identical twins, one of whom had erected a tent on his back, he would be the one I would shun.

However, of course, there were slugs around when I was a boy, so I look upon them with the contempt of familiarity. Also, they are abominable. I don’t want to say what they look like, but you know what they look like and that’s what they look like.

Only the slugs of today are different to the ones of my youth, at least as far as I can remember. For a start there are more of them. And the slugs themselves seem roughly twice the size.

But the biggest innovation I have noticed is the luminous orange slug. I’m sure they are new, though I am willing to accept this is a misconception.

I wonder how the rest of the slug community responded to this development.

And here I am, wondering . . . 

A BROWN SLUG AND ORANGE SLUG ARE TALKING IN THE ORANGE SLUG’S BEDROOM.

BROWN SLUG: Now, Torquil, your mother and I have had a long discussion about this, but the fact is you can’t go around like, y’know, that.

ORANGE SLUG: Like what? You are repressing my inner nature. I must be free to express myself.

BROWN SLUG: Codswallop. All right, what about a nice dark brown?

ORANGE SLUG: ”Skunkweed” was right. Typical bourgeois slug parents.

BROWN SLUG: That’s not what slugs are. We’re brown, slimy, very slow, sluggish, even. We don’t like to be seen. Leave the glamour to the snails.

ORANGE SLUG: Why must we apologise for who we are? Just because we do not carry our homes upon our backs, can we not be beautiful? I must be bright, shining, flamboyant.

BROWN SLUG: You’ve given me food for thought. Come on, let’s go down for tea, Torquil. Your mother’s got . . . 

ORANGE SLUG: Let me guess . . . lettuce?

THEY LEAVE THE BEDROOM. THEN, AS AN AFTERTHOUGHT . . . 

BROWN SLUG: What about black? Your cousin Terry’s black.

ORANGE SLUG: He’s a Goth!

I bet that’s exactly what happened. Although, as I said, zoology is not my strong suit.

PS: I was challenged to get the word “dodecahedrons” into this week’s column. I have clearly failed. Actually, wait a minute. Surely that counts.

I HAVE difficulty judging how quickly people are walking. This is possibly why I was never very good at football or three-legged races.

I think the first time I realised my limitation in this department was when I was assaulted by an elderly blind woman.

I was walking along a road, with a pavement of decent width, when the little old lady hoved into view, swinging her long white stick. As a result, I went into full blind-person-coming-readiness.

Now, as I walked I noticed there was a lamp-post ahead, and a car illegally parked with its nearside wheels on the pavement, leaving a very small gap. I’ve a certain degree of sympathy with the driver, as it was a narrow road, and I absolve him of blame for the incident which was to occur.

The blind old lady was approaching at, I assumed, normal blind old lady speed, sweeping her cane ahead of her. I was confident that I would reach the lamp-post before her and could nip around it, enabling both of us to go on our way. After all, I’m reasonably spry, and, crucially, sighted.

How wrong I was. The little old blind lady was walking at least as fast as me. She reached the lamp-post before me, blocking my path with the sweep of her cane and I had to fling myself into the small gap between the parked car and the post, grazing my elbow on it.

She, of course, was unaware of the distress she had caused and continued on her speedy way, scattering chickens and small children who ventured into her path.

But my inability to judge the velocity of pedestrians is now seriously inconveniencing other people. And I have now reached the nadir in my relationship with the rest of the human race as a result of it.

I held a door open for a lady. I often do this, I do it for gentlemen as well. I am an equal-opportunity door-holder, well brought up. Occasionally people even thank me for performing this task. This lady did not.

You see, when I opened the door, the lady (we’ll call her Lady A) was marginally in The Zone. That’s the area around the door within which one can expect the person by the door to keep it open until one arrives.

She was a middle-aged lady, and it’s usually fun holding a door for middle-aged ladies as they feel obliged to run in that way that only middle-aged ladies run – biceps pressed against their sides, forearms flailing, a face which says: “No, I am not running. Stop looking at me.”

But what I hadn’t noticed was that Lady A was walking very slowly indeed – limping, in fact. And now she felt obliged to pick up the pace because I was holding the door for her. Very, and obviously, painfully, she sped up, a brave smile on her face, flickering into a grimace every time she put her left foot on the ground. I could tell she hated me.

And I hated her a little bit, too, because the door was alarmed. We had around 30 seconds’ grace before the alarm sounded. “Come on, you slow moo,” I thought in my head.

Then she dropped a folder, and bent agonisingly slowly to pick it up. A dilemma – should I help her, or stay holding the door? I made a judgment call and stayed with the door – we’d both been through too much to throw it away.

Finally, Lady A came within range of the door, and I stepped back into the office. We were home and dry.

Except . . . the thing about doors is they have two sides. And if they have two sides, they have two Zones.

Behind me, rushing for the door was another woman, Lady B, fleeter of foot, who assumed I was holding the door open for her.

She dashed past me. I couldn’t stop her. I even heard her say, “Thank you.”

She crashed right into Lady A, almost knocking her on to her backside. And so, a sadder and wiser man, to the sound of the alarm, I walked away.

I couldn’t tell you how quickly, though.

I HAVE recently become concerned that we’ve gone a bit mad, with regard to treats you might have with a cup of tea.

It started with the chocolate-chip cookie. When I was a boy, a cookie was something eaten by a blue furry monster, or it was a small, incredibly hard, wrinkly biscuit dotted with a small number of chocolate-flavoured chips and maybe the odd shard of hazelnut if one was lucky.

But now a cookie is an object roughly the size of a frisbee, which could do with another 10 minutes in the oven, and is filled with lumps of chocolate equivalent in volume to a broken bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk.

And that’s just an ordinary chocolate-chip cookie. There are double-chocolate cookies, with chocolate dough, triple-chocolate, with a coating of chocolate. At this point the cookie is essentially all chocolate, with homeopathic quantities of cookie crumb.

I don’t know what a quadruple chocolate-chip cookie would be. The only way they could get more chocolate into the cookie is if they started to expand into other dimensions.

Tesco is supposedly working on the concept along with Costa as a back-up plan for when there is no more room on earth for them to open shops.

But if cookies were in the vanguard, the cupcake smashed down the gates to the citadel. I remember when a cupcake was known as a fairy cake, a tiny confection with a scant speck of icing around the size of a 10p piece on top.

Now cupcakes are Incredible Hulks of sponge, atop which rests a pink whipped glob of butter and sugar around the size of K2.

I’m not even sure cupcakes are designed for human consumption. I see them everywhere, but I’ve never seen a woman eat them. Perhaps they feel guilty and only eat them behind closed doors, with the aid of a ladder and chainsaw.

And when the likes of me complained that cupcakes were so vast that they were starting to bend space-time to make it appear that The X-Factor was on telly for five months of the year, the confectioner’s solution was to say: “Oh, yes. It does look a bit unbalanced. I know, we’ll shove another Hulk’s worth of sponge on the top and call it a whoopie pie.”

It’s just too much excitement. When I was a child, the most fun I could expect with my cup of tea was a ginger nut or bourbon, maybe a fruit shortcake.

Occasionally, as a special treat, I might even get my hands on the king of biscuits, the Jaffa Cake.

Yes, I’m calling it a biscuit. I don’t really want to get embroiled in the Jaffa Cake “cake or biscuit” controversy. But, as far as I am concerned, Jaffa Cakes are biscuits in the same way as friends of your mum were known as Auntie Dot or Auntie Pat, even though they were not your relatives.

They sit on the plate next to the ginger nuts and the bourbons and are therefore biscuits-by-association.

No, dammit, I will go further. Imagine you are visiting a dear and close friend. “Nice cup of tea?” she asks, and she disappears into the kitchen. You hear the click and hiss of the kettle.

Then, she sticks her head around the door. “Ooh, and I’ve got you a cake.” You sit there waiting, rubbing your hands together with glee. This, I would contend, is the life.

Then in she walks with the tea tray. She sets it down in front of you, hands you your tea and a plate upon which rests . . . a Jaffa Cake. Imagine that gut punch. THAT is why a Jaffa Cake is not a cake, no matter what the manufacturers or the gnomes of Brussels say.

And the solution to that sort of disappointment is to lower your expectations, not to reinvent the Jaffa Cake as a bed made of sponge with a mattress of orange jelly and a chocolate duvet. That’s just how the cookie crumbles.

I WENT to Costco on Sunday. Well, I had to. I’d completely run out of 60-litre bottles of olive-style oil, whirlpool baths and big tellies, and where else was I going to get them all in the one shop?

In amongst the pre-braised lamb shanks and mammoth multi-packs of contraceptives (Who buys those, by the way? It would be quite the statement of intent) I found a packet of prunes. 

Now, I do like a prune and don’t mind who knows it. If you’re put off by the name, redolent of 70s sitcoms and old people’s homes, then that’s your problem – more prunes for me and to hell with the consequences.

But I refused to buy these prunes, because they had been rebranded in a desperate attempt to bypass the prune stigma.

And what were they now called? Fruity Snax 2.0? Fun Plums? Mega Raisins? 

No. A marketing numpty had renamed them “pitted dried plums”. Pitted and dried. It would be difficult to imagine two more dismal words used to attract consumers. “Diseased and disappointing,” possibly. What sort of person would refuse to buy prunes because of the image problem, but happily snap up a bag of pitted dried plums? I suspect there wouldn’t be many.

I went on to Tesco, because life as a journalist isn’t all glamour, glamour, glamour, and was assailed again by the marketer’s art. I was looking for a torch and Tesco had just the thing, a nice silver jobbie, like one would imagine Fox Mulder would hold at shoulder height if The X-Files was still on the television.

But this wasn’t an ordinary torch, apparently. This was a “high velocity” torch. I scoured the packaging to work out exactly what this meant in the context of a torch, but gleaned no clues. Was it more aerodynamic than other torches? And why would one throw a torch in any case?

Or maybe, somehow, the light from this torch travels faster than light from other torches. It was starting to look like a bargain. For years, I’ve bemoaned the sluggish performance of conventional torches and their frustrating way of casting out light at the speed of light and no quicker. My misery was at an end. Take that, physics!

The alternative did not bear thinking about. Could a marketing gimp have just chosen a couple of words which sounded good but were essentially meaningless? Surely not.

But the portents were there. It was clear the marketing divvies had taken over. And the proof was all over the deodorant shelves. There, I saw two different varieties of the same brand of deodorant. One offered 24-hour protection, another reduced underarm white marking. What a dilemma. If I opted for 24-hour protection, and, let’s face it, I should, I was leaving myself open to white marks under my arms. But if I wanted pristine pits, and, let’s face it, I should, I was going to have to forego 24-hour protection. I could only expect 18 hours, tops.

I suddenly understood why Roman Catholic priests don’t marry. Those black shirts would look terrible under the arms if they chose 24-hour protection. On the other hand, if they didn’t want the white marks, they’d be a bit whiffy after a long day. No wonder women aren’t interested in them.

Celibacy has nothing to do with tradition and papal authority, and everything to do with the unwillingness of deodorant manufacturers to put all the things one actually requires from a deodorant into one bottle.

It’s not even as if we can combine deodorants. For one thing, they all have different smells, so anybody coming close to your underarm would experience the same nauseous effect as one does walking within 50 feet of a branch of Lush.

I blame the marketers. They’ll be running the country next.

I RECENTLY took delivery of a FutureScope 5000.

You won’t have seen one yet as they’ve yet to be invented, but basically it’s like a special television which lets you see the future. I won’t trouble you with the detail about how I got hold of it. This isn’t an episode of Doctor Who.

I can’t use the device for personal gain, to influence important future events or for any trivial purposes, which renders it fairly useless, so don’t ask me for Saturday’s lottery numbers. (I will tell you this, though. If you’re a football fan, don’t bother taking any holiday next May. And we never find out where they are in Lost.)

Anyway, I’ve just watched a broadcast from 2016, which I found quite instructive, and I’ll share it with you…

AN INTERVIEW ROOM. A PANEL OF THREE IS INTERVIEWING A MAN.

CHAIRMAN: Mr Dooley, we’ve read your CV, and it’s very impressive.

PANELLIST #1: Ooh, yes. Nicely set out. Very posh. Did you do it on a computer?

DOOLEY: Er, yes.

CHAIRMAN: And I think I speak for the panel when I say you come across well at interview. We’ve no doubt you can do the job.

DOOLEY: Great!

CHAIRMAN: There’s just one thing. There is another candidate who is equally qualified who we’ve already seen. So I’m afraid we have to go to the statutory tie-breaker: who’s got the best wife?

DOOLEY: Oh!

CHAIRMAN: Yes, ever since the 2010 general election was decided by which candidate had the best wife, and the winner brought in a golden age of prosperity, the end of global warming and the retention of BBC Radio 6 Music, it’s been generally acknowledged as the most effective way to decide on the best man for the job.

PANELLIST #2: Or woman.

CHAIRMAN: Yes, very funny, Derek. As if! You did bring your wife, didn’t you?

DOOLEY: Of course. Just in case. Darling?

MRS DOOLEY WALKS IN.

CHAIRMAN: Very nice. Well turned out. Is that a tattoo?

DOOLEY: It is. But it’s a small tasteful one.

CHAIRMAN: A bit racy, but nothing too threatening, like pink fur-lined handcuffs. Ideal. Good. Mrs Dooley, tell us about your husband.

MRS DOOLEY: Oh, he’s ace. You should absolutely give him the job. He’d be good.

CHAIRMAN: Nice voice, posh but not too posh. Good. Any complaints about his conduct?

MRS DOOLEY: He works too hard, and he squeezes the toothpaste tube in the middle.

CHAIRMAN: Excellent. The first part is a compliment thinly disguised as a criticism. The second humanises the candidate. This is top-notch stuff. What do you reckon?

PANELLIST #1: She’s got lovely shoes.

PANELLIST #2: I fancy her a bit. Not a lot, but more than the other one. She was a right sour-faced moo.

CHAIRMAN: She certainly was. Mr Dooley, the job’s yours. You’ve definitely got the best wife. Can I borrow her? I’m up for president of my golf club and my own wife is rubbish.

The broadcast ends there. I think we’ve learnt a valuable lesson: always do your CV on your computer as it looks nicer.

IF YOU want to feel old and a bit rubbish, I highly recommend going for an eye test. Hand over £50 and you can confirm that you can’t see properly any more.

I can’t complain about the professionalism of my optician, neither in her conduct nor in her ability to extort money I had no idea I was going to shell out.

But I really don’t like tests, especially ones I know I’m going to fail. I mean, I’ve worn glasses all my life.

“Sit there,” said my pleasant examiner, “And rest your chin on there.” That was nice of her. My chin needed a rest after being agog at the price of some of the designer frames.

It was just like being at school and looking through the railings at the outside world. She flashed a few bright lights at me and puffed air in my eye. She said it was to test the strength of my muscles, but I reckon it was just to see if she could make me cry. Like I say, just like being at school.

“Would you like me to take a picture of the back of your eyes?” Too flipping right, I thought. How cool is that? More to the point, how was she going to get a camera in there?

“Good. Oh, there’s an extra charge.” FLASH! Another bright light. An orange veiny orb appeared on her computer screen. It was my eye, either that or a close-up of a female body builder.

Having broken my spirit, she took me into the testing room. I sat in the dentist-style chair.

“Do you have any trouble with floaters?” she asked.

“I beg your pardon.”

“In your eye. Do you have any trouble with floaters in your eye?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Can you read the bottom line?” Blimey, I thought. If I could read that bottom line, I wouldn’t be sitting here. I’d be counting grains of sand on the surface of Jupiter. I’ve just come in WEARING GLASSES. What do you think?

“Er, no,” I said.

“Have you ever thought about contact lenses?” I wrinkled my nose. I had but only in the same sense as I’ve thought about having a full body wax. It seems like a lot of discomfort for something nobody else would even notice.

She moved in with what she thought would be the clincher. “Well, to be honest, with your very poor right eye, you’d only need one.”

Excellent, I thought. A monocle that only works when I put it in my eye, you say? I can’t even shower without having a towel nearby in case I get a bit of soap in – how likely is it that I’d voluntarily shove a shard of hard plastic onto my eyeball?

“No,” I said. “I’m a glasses wearer. I’ve worn specs all my life. It’s part of my identity. People use it as short-hand when referring to me. ‘See Gary over there, him with the glasses?’ ‘What, the weird-looking speccy one with the towel?’ ‘Yeah, him.’ That’s me.”

She went quiet.

Anyway, the good news was that my eyesight hadn’t changed. The bad news was that it was still rubbish. I staggered downstairs to look at the frames for my new specs. But there were two choices, essentially: invisible and very very visible. Dammit, I thought, I’m a glasses wearer. I’m not going to apologise for it. Say it loud, I’m a four-eyes and I’m proud.

I chose a frame and waited in the sales area while the helpful assistant found as many charges as she could to add onto my bill. 

“When will they be ready?” I asked.

“We’ve an hour service. That’s an extra £5 .”

“Great! I’ll have that.”

“They’ll be ready at 3pm.”

“But it’s noon.”

“Yes, but you want super-duper techno lenso magic.”

“But you’ve just told me I need that.”

Defeated, I left and returned three hours later. I wore my new, very very visible specs to work. “Are you wearing those for a bet?” asked a colleague.

“What do you mean?”

“Those glasses. I didn’t know you wore glasses.”

IT WAS a glorious early spring day on Old Hall Street and the light glinted off the gleaming glass of the Liverpool Daily Post Hyperdome.

Flowers of optimism were in bloom everywhere, warmed by the rays of the March sun. Lunchtime walkers were openly ambling about without coats. It was, in short, ace.

It couldn’t last. Not for the likes of me.

I stood at a pelican crossing, a small bag of nuts in my hand, and she appeared next to me, the woman who would ruin my day.

I looked right, then left, and made a terrible discovery. The woman was wearing a pair of jeans, and her zip was open.

I’m no fashion expert. It’s entirely possible that this is how young people are wearing their trousers these days. “Yo, wassup, dude?” they might say to each other. “What are you doing with your zip up? There’s no way you can hang with my posse if you ain’t flying low. So to speak.”

But what if it were a fashion faux pas, as I strongly suspected?

You see, if I were in the same position as Zip Lady, I’d want to know. In fact, I hereby grant you, the reader, permission to approach me in any circumstances if you notice any such wardrobe nonsense.

And if the person standing next to me had been a gentleman, I would have had no qualms about pointing out his inadequacy.

“Hey, mate,” I’d have said, in the universal language of men who don’t know each other, “You’re, erm.” And he’d have known, and sorted himself out.

And I’d have had to write a column about something else.

But I have no idea about the etiquette of telling a woman about that sort of thing. If she’d had a label sticking out, or her top was on inside-out, or she had a slug on her sleeve, I’d have told her. Trouser grief, on the other hand, is a minefield.

I resorted to my stock response when faced with any dilemma: What Would John Leslie Do?

I identified the former Blue Peter and This Morning presenter as an anti-role model long before the various unsavoury and unfounded allegations about his private life, owing to his uncanny ability to do the wrong thing in any given situation.

The man, never let it be forgotten, dumped Catherine Zeta-Jones a nano-second before she became one of the biggest stars in Hollywood.

Then, later, he mislaid a video tape he took while entertaining the fragrant Abi Titmuss, an activity which, in any case, risked damaging valuable electronic equipment.

So what, indeed, would John Leslie do in the event of a lady’s garment malfunction? A case immediately sprang to mind.

When the TV host Judy Finnigan proved too robust for her halterneck dress, and flashed the nation during a live awards ceremony, Leslie was the one person in an audience of hundreds who dashed forward and adjusted her decolletage.

I decided he, no doubt, would have walked across, without fuss, bent over (he’s a tall gentleman) and pulled up her zip himself, giving the lady a friendly wink.

I did the opposite. I studiously avoided her glance and tore away at the earliest opportunity. Ignorance is bliss. As is not being punched in the eye by an irate woman in jeans.

 

MORE proof that ignorance is bliss – the continuing scone-eating grin of Gideon “George” Osborne.

The man’s clearly an idiot. He’s either going to lose the election or he’s going to become Chancellor of the Exchequer. He has nothing to smile about.

Still, it’s a source of delight that Labour refers to him as “Boy George”, as he’s eight months older than me. Only in politics could somebody who left his teenage years behind 20 years ago be considered the giddy voice of callow youth.

GAZING through my bus window, I saw him. Clad in close-fitting green and yellow, he balanced upon his cycle at the red light.

His face set granite in concentration, he edged forward a centimetre at a time, deftly yet jerkily twisting his front wheel to keep upright and moving at all times.

I marvelled at his skill. And then I thought, “You massive divvy.”

When I was learning how to ride a bike, the first thing I was taught was how to put one foot on the ground to avoid falling over.

Yet this man had apparently bought all the expensive kit without knowing how to stop.

I have no idea how he was going to end his journey. Perhaps he was hoping to find a mattress shop which displayed its wares upon the pavement.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he knew perfectly well how to stop, but was compelled not to. 

Had Dennis Hopper attached some sort of explosive device which would detonate if he came to a rest?

Perhaps he was helping sick kiddies by doing a sponsored “being a eejit.”

Or maybe he was one of those cyclists who, upon seeing a red traffic light, thinks: “This is not for the likes of me, for I, I am a cyclist. Stop? I shall never stop, for I am protected by my magical shield of environmental smug.”

Of course, had he had the courage of his convictions, he wouldn’t have been such a terrible weed, and would have raced forward, across the Allerton Road traffic, confident that his brightly-coloured high-visibility outfit would make him impervious to accidents, cars skidding in his wake.

The light turned to green and he made off, nipping through the traffic, flipping from lane to lane.

I have absolutely no idea why some cyclists should behave like idiots on the road. If I were balancing on two wheels, exposed to the world, I would be warier of the Goliath machines punching through the air beside me.

I certainly wouldn’t take risks like dashing in front of cars, weaving in and out of the traffic, and jumping red lights.

Nippy might well beat big and lumbering most of the time, but when big and lumbering wins, it tends to be a decisive victory.

 

I CAN’T begin to count the number of times I’ve been in a restaurant and had to send back a mixed grill because the tomato wasn’t a perfect hemisphere.

As my old gran used to say, a tomato that isn’t round is like a dog with five legs – an abomination and an insult to Mother Nature. Mind you, she used to go absolutely spare if she saw we’d bought plum tomatoes. We’d have to point them at her so they looked round from her perspective. In the end, we decided buying tomatoes just wasn’t worth the trouble.

So I’m delighted to see Marks & Spencer has come to my rescue. Currently the store is selling tomatoes. But these aren’t just ordinary tomatoes. These are M&S Classic Round Tomatoes. 

Now I can buy tomatoes with confidence, safe in the knowledge that I’m not going to find an elongated one.

And they’re not just Classic Round Tomatoes. They’re “the perfectly versatile tomato.” Again, this is a plus point for me. I’m sick and tired of boring one-dimensional tomatoes, only suited to eating.

I want an all-purpose tomato – one I can use as a torch, an MP3 player and a wallpaper pasting table – and M&S has clearly come up with the goods.

Ah, hang on. It doesn’t say on the packet whether they’re red tomatoes or not. I mean, I can see that they’re red through the cellophane, but you can’t be too careful.

Oh, well, if they’re not absolutely perfect, I can always throw them at the nearest cyclist and see if I can tip him over.