I KNOW that wide-scale jet-pack use is not going to happen in my lifetime, despite quite clear and specific promises in my youth. A cure for the common cold is as far away as ever, and I quite understand the reasons for that.

But I refuse to accept that there is no immediate prospect of boffins perfecting bin technology so that I can have one which opens and closes without causing me any sort of difficulty.

For the past 15 years or so, I have been searching for the perfect bin – and, by perfect, I mean adequate – like Stanley, searching for Livingstone. Or Alan Davies, searching for a way out.

My first disappointment with regard to bins was with a swing top model. You will be familiar with this type of bin – lozenge-shaped with a white V-shaped lid which swings both ways on a hinge.

I am not entirely sure why a kitchen bin lid needs to swing both ways. It is a rare kitchen which has the bin in the centre of the room, easily accessible from all angles. “Well, Claudia, we were thinking about having an island there, but in the end we plumped for a lozenge- shaped bin.”

It did not live up to expectations. The lid kept swinging off its hinge, and every time I touched, or even thought about, the non-moving part of the lid, it would become a moving part of the lid, falling off the base and depositing the swinging part into the bin itself.

Bin number 2 was more promising, a pedal bin. I am a man. When one introduces an element of machinery into a household object, one gets a little bit excited. Depress a pedal at the bottom to open the lid at the top? That’s like flipping Mouse Trap.

But pedal bins do not work either, it transpired. The pedal on my bin was more like a trigger. One had to depress it slowly and then, at a variable point, the lid would flip up.

Push too hard and the lid would stay up, even after the foot had been withdrawn. Given that the whole point of a pedal bin is to obviate the necessity to touch the bin with one’s hands, this was something of a failure.

Push too gently, however, and the lid would hover, quivering, at a 20 degree angle, giving just about enough room to throw in a dropped Rich Tea biscuit, but nothing thicker. It was not a Mouse Trap of a bin, it was an Operation.

The third bin started off so well. A gleaming chrome cylinder with a flat black top. Push the lid gently, and it would flip up. Flip is the wrong word to use. It would glide up. If it had a sound effect associated with it, it would be the sound of the automatic doors opening in Star Trek, appropriate for the Space Age bin it was. I loved that bin more than another man has ever loved a bin, ie, lots.

And then, after two weeks, the catch went. Yes, I might have used it a bit more than was necessary – it did have a lovely action – but, really, TWO WEEKS? And the lid would not go down. In the end, the only way I could keep the lid down was to place a bag of rubbish on top of it. It is difficult to imagine a more damning failure of bin design.

Difficult, but not impossible. For now I have the worst bin of all – Bin Laden. Bin Laden is also chrome, with a black top, but the lid is on a 45 degree angle and closes, thanks to a powerful spring. And the lid is about the size of a bread roll plate, making it fine for the disposal of bread rolls, apple cores, crumpled-up Liz Jones articles, etc.

But watch me scrape a plate into Bin Laden and watch a man cry. For plate scraping requires a minimum of two hands, one to hold the plate, and one to make a horrible noise with a knife. And pushing back a bin lid held in place with a powerful spring takes one hand.

One does not have to be Carol Vorderman to realise that, even with a full complement of hands, I am going to spill bean juice all over my trousers. So off comes the lid, and I find myself back at square one. Or, more accurately, lozenge one.

PHIL COOL saved my life once.

If you are knocking on the door of middle-age, or, like me, are hanging around in the vestibule of middle-age reading the takeaway pizza leaflet, you will remember Phil Cool well.

For those of you who think of the 1980s as an exotic time, full of Tom Cruise in aviator specs having a Rubik’s Cube-off with Mr T and the Human League in a bleeping warehouse, I will explain Phil Cool. Incidentally, you are exactly right. That is what the 80s were like.

Phil Cool was, and still is, an impressionist, able to re-arrange his facial features at will – the anti-Andie MacDowell – and had a hugely popular series on BBC2 called Cool It, before he decided fame was not for him and retired from television. But when I was nearly 17, he was at the height of his fame.

I had recently acquired a harmonica, fancying that the ability to play the harmonica would make me catnip to teenage girls. I might as well have learnt the bagpipes.

And I had the harmonica with me when I went to the heaving cellar of Flanagan’s Apple on Mathew Street, with Martin and Philip, my equally unencumbered-by- female-interest friends from school. I liked going out with Martin and Philip as they looked a year older and were able to be served at the bar without any reasonable doubt on the barmaid’s part in those pre-ID days.

I, however, was much fresher of face, like some freakish elongated baby. So that night, after Martin and Philip had both got their rounds in, they turned to me.

“Get the Guinnesses in,” they said.

“I don’t like Guinness. It tastes like earwax,” I said. I looked over at the bar. I was convinced the barmaid would not serve me. She looked the sort. “I won’t get served.”

“Get on with it, you freakish elongated baby,” they said.

The Saturday night Flanagan’s crowd at that time was entertained by a singing guitarist whose name my memory convinces me was Lenny. Members of the exclusive clientele were often invited to join him on the tiny stage and sing along.

A plan formed. If I got up on stage with Lenny, it would surely be proof to the bar staff that I was of age. After all, what sort of idiot would draw attention to himself if he were underage?

At that moment, Lenny’s G-string snapped. Let us ignore the comic resonance of that statement and join me as I push through the crowd, harmonica in hand.

“Fancy a jam?” I ask, anticipating tooting the odd note in the background. Even I can handle that.

“Nice one,” says Lenny. “You just play for a bit while I fix this.” Before I can say anything, he introduces me to the audience as “Johnny Harmonica.”

I look out at a sea of faces. I don’t know what to do. I can’t play anything all the way through. And who really wants to listen to an unaccompanied harmonica? Somebody clears his throat. As the silence goes on, the atmosphere becomes threatening.

And suddenly Phil Cool’s gurning face swims into my head. I bet I could play the harmonica-based theme tune to his show, Cool It. So I begin. And it turns out I can. And, a few bars in, the crowd starts to clap along.

It isn’t a long song, so I start to improvise. Brilliantly. I take the roof off, readers, which is even more difficult given we are in a cellar. I finish to applause and cheers. And then I accompany and sing along with Lenny as he does the Rolling Stones’ All Over Now. It is the best night of my life.

I step down and am patted on the back all the way to the bar.

“Blimey,” say Philip and Martin, as I pass.

I drink it in. This is my life now. Adulation and respect all the way. I am Johnny Harmonica.

“Two pints of Guinness and a pint of cider, please,” I say.

The barmaid looks at me and beams.

“There’s no way you’re 18, lad,” she says.

It has been like that ever since.

I LOVE tea. I don’t like coffee. I know that coffee is sophisticated and rich and French and that tea is for characters from Coronation Street in the 1970s, but I can’t help it.

I don’t like Guinness either. If I wanted to be reminded of the taste of earwax, I have ready access to a supply.

But that is by the by, let us concentrate on the positive. I love tea. So when I examined the tea and coffee making facilities in the hotel room from which I send this dispatch, I was disappointed, though not surprised. I have written before about the paucity of tea and coffee making facilities in hotels.

There were two teabags to last me 24 hours. That would only be an adequate number of teabags for somebody who sort of liked tea, but was not fussed, although I cannot imagine such a person. It certainly is not enough for me, a tea lover.

Luckily, after the last time I complained about this nonsense, a reader suggested I bolster my tea supplies by purloining a bag or two from the “continental breakfast buffet.” I cannot condone thievery, no matter how minor. On the other hand, I had a reasonable case for describing myself as a sort of Robin Hood figure.

I stood in front of the display of tea and coffee sachets, with a cup in my hand, and picked up an “everyday” teabag, and another one in the same movement. I had two teabags, but to onlookers it appeared as if I had only one. It was the perfect crime.

But then I was aware of somebody next to me. I glanced to my left and saw a member of staff standing there, watching me. This was a disaster. There was no way I’d be able to operate the hot water machine and tear open the sachet without her noticing that I had two.

I waited, pretending to regard the tea and coffee sachets more keenly than was necessary, hoping that she’d vanish. But she did not. She was clearly waiting for me to do something.

I looked around, searching for inspiration. And I found it. “Is that a toaster?” I asked, indicating a toaster. As she turned and confirmed it was indeed a toaster, I slipped the teabags inside my pocket. Better, I thought, that she consider me the sort of person who isn’t sure if a toaster-shaped object with bread sticking out of the top of it is a toaster than a common thief.

She turned back, as I remembered I had two teabags in my pocket. And so she watched me remove a single teabag from my pocket and drop it into my cup. She walked away, I think shaking her head. It was hard to tell as I couldn’t bear to look at her directly.

Nevertheless, I realised, I’d got away with it. I had swiped an extra teabag, undetected.

But, like a Bond villain, I was compelled to boast about it. When I reached the office in which I am working this week, I placed the teabag on the desk and, took a photo of it on my phone, which I uploaded to Twitter. And then I charged up my phone, because I had used up the battery in the process.

And while I was doing this, fate, like James Bond, was wriggling out of her ropes and readying herself to pounce.

At the end of the day, I sat in a colleague’s car in a scorching half-hour, traffic jam-filled, half-mile journey back to our hotel. But I didn’t mind. For that night, I would drink my fill of tea.

As I walked into the lobby, I patted my pocket. My phone was not there. It was sitting in the office, merrily charging up. I am a 21st century man. My life is on my phone. Also, I had to send this column, and I couldn’t do that without my phone, so in a way you are responsible.

I trudged back in the sweltering heat to the office, retrieved my phone, returned, with the baking sun on my back and no access to a knotted handkerchief, used my single allocated evening teabag for a swift cuppa, and joined my colleagues for dinner.

Afterwards, I retired to my room to put the kettle on, before writing this.

And that’s when I realised that the teabag was still on my desk.

I WAS sharpening a pencil at the weekend when it occurred to me that I complete that task successfully on at best 30% of attempts.

And, as this devastating realisation struck me, I heard a soft crack, and I sighed. I pulled the pencil out of the chamber and examined it.

It was almost textbook, the red paint undulating around the smooth grain of the exposed cedar wood, which tapered into a perfect cone. And there, where the pointed graphite core theoretically should have been, was a void. I had failed. This was an unleaded pencil.

I looked for a safety pin, found one, pricked myself – because the safety of safety pins is a relative concept – and cleared the broken lead from the blade. That was almost textbook too, long and sharp as a safety pin, only its lack of actually being attached to a pencil letting it down.

One quarter-turn, I realised. That was what stood between this broken pencil and the Platonic ideal of a sharpened pencil.

Ten years from now, BBC4 would have commissioned a prestigious drama-documentary around this moment, starring Rafe Spall as me. They would have had to use a computer-generated image of the pencil, though, because there is no way they would have been able to replicate it. That is how good it would have been.

I sighed again, and shoved the pencil back into the chamber. I was going to give it another go. Perhaps this would be the only pencil lead in existence which was broken in one place. You never know. Maybe it was my turn to win the lottery of life.

I gave it two more goes before flinging the pencil in the bin, and finding another.

Right now, some of you are sitting reading this and thinking: “Look at the big fool with his pencil sharpener. Everybody knows the best way to sharpen a pencil is to get a Stanley knife and shave away the wood to make the best and most durable point.”

And I say to you people this: the fact is I have tried sharpening a pencil with a knife, and only managed to hack rough chunks out of it.

For I am from the city. I am not an Appalachian mountain man. I do not play the banjo. I am only related to my wife by marriage. I am as likely to be adept at whittling as I am to catch one of the grey squirrels which caper around my garden, skin it, roast it on an open fire and have it for my tea with hominy grits, whatever they are.

All pencils are rubbish, though. Mechanical pencils are just as bad. There is an optimal click with mechanical pencils, one which delivers just the right amount of lead. But most of the time the lead is too long, in which case it breaks, or too short, in which case the lead runs out and the metal casing gouges a hole in the piece of paper.

In fairness, I did do the optimal click once in 1993 and the pencil worked quite well for a couple of minutes.

Pencils with rubbers stuck on the end are equally annoying. I think we know each other well enough now for me to state uncontroversially that I have made more than two mistakes in my life.

However, the erasers on the end of pencils only allow for the user to make a maximum of two mistakes. After that, the rubber perishes and the incredibly and inappropriately sharp metal cylinder which holds the rubber vaguely in place tears the page to confetti. It is a clever idea, utterly ruined by its execution. Like Lib Dems in government.

There’s a story about the space race which says that the Americans spent millions on developing a pen which would work in a weightless environment, of which there is loads in space. The Russians, however, used a pencil.

At this point, we’re meant to chuckle at the decadent Yanks, but I bet their pen worked, while the Russian cosmonauts spent their time dodging clouds of graphite dust and wood shavings. And cursing their pencil sharpeners. And wondering what squirrel tastes like.

I HAD to go to a box office to collect concert tickets which I had ordered last September. I admit I had been putting it off, because I was worried that something would go wrong.

How ridiculous of me. Of course something was going to go wrong. All I was doing was saving the broccoli till last.

So I ensured I had the necessary documentation, held my breath, and went for it, ready for a battle.

“Can I pick up these tickets, please?” I said, brightly, hoping to lull the box office clerk into a false sense of security. If things turned nasty, I needed the element of surprise on my side.

I pushed the printed online receipt over to the cashier. She inspected it in a friendly, but efficient, manner. This was going well. Too well.

“Have you got the card that was used to order the tickets?” she asked. Had I? What sort of amateur did she think I was? Perhaps I had overplayed the earlier lulling, making her consider me a simpleton.

I pulled out my wallet, flipped it open, and slid my card out of its mooring, all in one fluid movement, as James Bond would have done in this situation. I could see the clerk swiftly revising her opinion of me. Game over. Those tickets had my name on them. Literally, as it happens.

But as I pushed the card under the glass something occurred to me, the tricky detail which Sherlock Holmes would have picked up earlier, but I, as a real person, had not.

“Erm, it’s not actually the card I used. That’s not a problem, is it…?”

The card I used for the transaction no longer exists as a whole. It is cut up and in bits in a landfill somewhere. I suppose I could have looked for it, and glued it back together, but that would have required a bit more effort than I had budgeted for yesterday.

And in any case it would have been unusable, as it expired at the end of December. It’s not as if I cut up cards willy-nilly. My bank had been quite clear as to my obligations. There is no way this was my fault.

It turned out I had lulled the box office clerk into a true sense of security. “Yes, it is a problem,” she said, and she went off to speak to somebody.

A queue was forming behind me.

The clerk came back to the window. “Do you have a bank statement which shows that the money was taken from your account in September?”

Let us imagine a world now in which people go about the place carrying bank statements from seven months ago on the off-chance that one day somebody will ask to see them. Look at those stooped people, their bags bulging with every bit of paper that has ever passed through their hands, like organised, mobile, Mister Trebuses. Fire hazards, that’s what they are.

“No,” I replied. “I don’t.”

The clerk sighed. “Do you have any identification with your picture on?” Now, I did have a copy of The Post in my bag, with a byline picture, but I wasn’t going to show her that. I’ve been down that cul-de-sac before.

Years ago, when I was a reporter, I doorstepped a woman, who refused to believe I was a journalist. I sort of understand why.

I did not have a press card at that point, but there was a copy of my paper in her porch, and on the front page was my byline picture. “Look, there I am,” I said. The woman scrutinised the photo. “That’s not you,” she said.

I don’t have much in the way of photo ID. There is almost as much photographic evidence of Jesus Christ. I took out my Costco card, but I really didn’t want to hand it over, as it is the one on which my face looks as if it is pressed against glass. Then I saw the pink plastic of my driving licence, and was relieved beyond normal expectations.

I handed it over, received the tickets, and staggered away, battered but victorious, ignoring the sour glances of the long queue behind me.

I don’t even want to go to the concert.

I WAS miles away from the nice old lady at the bus stop. Strictly speaking, I was about 30 feet away from the bus stop. After all, I have been unable to show my face at the actual bus stop since “The 5p Incident,” which I detailed some weeks ago.

Nevertheless, I was not paying full attention to my surroundings. I was checking every so often to see if my bus was coming, but mostly I was being annoyed by my phone.

“It’s your bus, love,” said the elderly lady. “You nearly missed it.” And, so doing, she was sure she had paid the debt she felt she owed me.

That was from the day we first met, about a year ago. “Don’t go in there,” she begged me, blocking my way to the bus shelter. “It’s full of bullets.”

“Whu-what?” I asked.

“They’ve left a load of bullets in there,” she said. “This place is getting worse and worse.”

“What?” I thought. “This is Woolton, not Baltimore. We don’t have gangs, we have a cinema and artisan cheese shop. When you go to the off-licence, the kids outside harass you to buy a bottle of red Chateauneuf-du-pape, ideally 2007.”

Gingerly, I approached the shelter. She was right. A couple of dozen live bullets were scattered around the floor and on the seats among a couple of empty beer bottles. It was chilling, intimidating. The message was clear. This was a gang which just didn’t care.

“We have to phone the police,” said the woman. I agreed. We stood looking at each other for a while. “You mean me, don’t you?” I said. “Yes,” she said.

I dialled 999 and described the scene. The operator said she would send a patrol car straight away. Then I called my colleagues on the newsdesk to tell them about my scoop. Then I turned to reassure the woman that the authorities were on their way to make the area safe. She was not there. She was peering into the gutter. “God bless us, there are a couple here, too.”

I walked over and inspected the bullets she had found. They were rather flat, as if a bus had driven over them. Yes, I thought, very flat. And very plasticky. Very obviously plasticky.

I dialled 999 again. “This is a bit embarrassing…” I started. I was too late, and 30 seconds later the patrol car arrived. I do not know if you have ever seen two police officers try to contain their laughter, but it is not edifying.

“Ah, well,” said the woman, as the police drove off. “Better to be safe, eh?”

“Yes,” I said, through gritted teeth, looking forward to explaining my self to the newsdesk.

I saw her again a couple of weeks ago. On that day, I decided, for a bit of excitement, to get a different bus, one which would take me to South Liverpool Parkway. From there I would get the train to the station near my office. I appreciate this does not sound very exciting, but my standards are quite low.

When I arrived at the ticket office, I was one of only two customers and there were two clerks. The other passenger, a woman, asked for a single to Moorfields. “£2.60,” said her clerk.

“A single to Moorfields,” I requested. “£2.75,” said my clerk. I thought that was a bit rum, but had I complained there was a risk that the woman would have to pay out another 15p. Burned by the baffling injustice, I resolved not to get the train again.

Which brings me back to last week. “It’s your bus, love,” said the elderly woman. “You nearly missed it.” It was the bus to the station.

For some reason she had remembered the bus I had caught on the previous occasion and, understandably, assumed that was my usual bus.

I had a choice: get the wrong bus, or have to explain to somebody that I only got that bus to bring some excitement to my grim existence, thereby disappointing her on several levels.

I bit the bullet, so to speak. I got the wrong bus. It cost me an extra £2.75. And I was late for work.

I have decided to change my bus stop. Sometimes you just can’t go back. Or within 30 feet of back.

“LET me take that ring,” I pleaded with the small child in my care. “It will fall off and you will lose it.”

The small child refused, and, as I don’t want to be perceived as the sort of person who wrests a ring from the finger of a small child, or attempts to wrest a ring from the finger of a small child and fails, the small child prevailed.

We sat, along with our dining companions in a restaurant. And when I say “restaurant” that is what I mean. For once, it was the sort of dining establishment in which somebody else brings the food to my table, and the drinks do not have lids on. And there are no balloons.

I ordered my seafood pasta in a flawless Italian accent, no doubt impressing the eastern European waiter. “This is a man,” he would have thought, in Cyrillic script, “who is not going to be gulled by a massive pepper grinder and cut-glass sugar bowl filled with Parmesan-style dust. I must raise my waiting game. Heh, that’s an actual English phrase, isn’t it?”

I left the table for a moment – you don’t need to know why – and when I returned was informed that the small child’s ring had unaccountably slipped from her finger and was now in an indeterminate location.

A number of emotions fought for supremacy in my head, including, I am ashamed to say, vindication. My mouth must have been a blur, constantly shifting between a smile and a frown, like one of those lenticular photos. But I settled on a “more in sorrow than in anger” disappointed look.

It was explained to me that I would have to look for it, and the starting place was under the table. So I dropped to my knees, and awkwardly crawled underneath. The first thing I noticed was that the lighting was not especially adequate for the purpose of finding a small child’s ring. And I had left my torch at home.

So I whipped out my phone and found a website with a white background. Then I used the white light from the screen to aid my search. It occurred to me that an app which was just a film of somebody shining a torch out of the screen would be a money-spinner and I was just about to say that we were going to be rich when I heard the words: “And the linguine marinara?”

I had previously presented the waiter with the very picture of a cosmopolitan man in his early forties. Now I was presenting him with my buttocks. I wondered how long he had been there.

There was a brief silence. “Yes, that’s mine,” I said, apparently speaking through my backside, and not for the first time. I had to make a decision: climb out from under the table and sit down, affecting that this was normal behaviour, or just stay there until he left? I am not much of an actor. I decided to stay. For one long minute.

When I was sure he had left, I crawled out, phone in hand.

“What have you been doing on your phone?” a companion asked. “I can neither explain nor excuse my behaviour,” I replied. “I can’t find the ring.”

In many ways, I wish I had not done it again after ordering after-dinner drinks. There was a sort of awful inevitability to it, but I did want to find the ring. “Pot of tea?” asked the waiter. “Yes, that’s here again,” said my bottom.

I didn’t find the ring, but I was reminded of it while watching the progress of the Cameron NHS reforms this week.

I believe the Conservatives do not particularly want to destroy the NHS, if only for electoral reasons, just as the small child in my care did not want to lose her ring.

And I am the Lib-Dems, entirely aware of the consequences of allowing the Conservatives to privatise the NHS, but unwilling to cause a fuss and take the ring off them.

And it is the Lib-Dems who will be scrabbling about on the floor, with their bottom in the air, all dignity long gone, looking for a ring which will be forever lost.

I’m not sure what the waiter represents. All analogies break down in the end.

THE boiler chose last week, the week I was off work, to spring a leak, which meant I had to perform the task I hate most in the world. This is to engage the services of a tradesman.

My wife had taken the liberty of compiling a list of likely candidates, from the Yellow Pages. It was a surprisingly short list, but then the Yellow Pages isn’t what it used to be. One doesn’t need Geoff Capes any more to rip one in half. It is more the Yellow Page these days.

Eventually I got through to a plumber who wasn’t booked up for the next 36 months. He asked me where the leak was coming from, assuming a level of technical ability on my part which I have previously never exhibited.

“It’s the sort of underneathy switchy bit, where the tubey thing is,” I explained. I was fairly sure I wasn’t using the correct terminology, but I had a go.

“Hmm, I’ll come and have a look.”

“Oh!” I said. “And the toilet won’t flush properly.” This was also true. The act of flushing had deteriorated markedly over the previous week, moving from a state of the user needing to have the knack to flush, to one of the user having to trick the toilet into flushing. It was time to grasp the nettle. Or the dock leaf, given the circumstances.

“What’s wrong with it?” asked the plumber.

“Erm, It won’t flush properly.” I wasn’t sure how else I could phrase it. The plumber realised he was going to get little more enlightenment from me and rang off with the promise that he would visit later.

In turn, I put the phone down and sighed. What I had feared most had inevitably happened. I had appeared candyfloss-brained and pathetic to a tradesman. It was as if I had turned up at a garage with my car and said to the mechanic: “Brum-brum all broked. Please make it better,” which I more or less do whenever I take my car to be fixed.

But why should I be worried about this? Why should I be expected to know his job? If I knew how to do his job, I wouldn’t need him. In fact, his entire livelihood depends on people like me not knowing a washer from, I don’t know, another thing they use in plumbing.

And he doesn’t know the first thing about my job. If a desperate criminal held a gun to his head and told him to write 700 words about a minor inconvenience he had had that week, he wouldn’t know where to start. “I want whimsy,” the thug would demand, clubbing the plumber with the butt of his pistol.

“This is essentially a ‘what I did on my holidays’ piece, you basket.”

The plumber arrived later that day, as promised. I led him to the boiler, competently enough. “Yeah, it’s the tap,” he said. “Tap!” I thought. “That was the word I was looking for.”

“If you’d said it was the tap, I’d have brought a replacement,” he said, regarding me ruefully. “I’ll have a look at the flush now.”

I led him to the toilet. He lifted the cistern lid. “Hmm,” he said, “I’ll have to turn the water off. Where’s the stopcock?”

“Isn’t that it?” I said, and pointed at the orange ball thing.

“No, not the ballcock, the stopcock!”

“Ah,” I said. I led him to the special cupboard with the pipes in. I was starting to feel like Sherpa Plumbing.

He turned the water off, went upstairs again, came back, informed me he didn’t have the parts, turned the water back on and said he would return in a couple of days. Then he left. I think we were both relieved.

A cup of tea was definitely called for. I put the kettle under the tap and turned it on. Water exploded into my face, drenching my entire upper body. Had I known more about plumbing I’d have known about the effects of air bubbles in pipes. But at least I have no need to fear whimsy-crazed criminals, so I win.

IT has been quite cold this week, the sort of cold where one has to ensure one has a blanket, a torch, water and chocolate when one is undertaking a journey. Admittedly, this can lead to strange looks on the bus, but I don’t care because I am warm. And I have a torch.

I was disappointed that Liverpool did not get the benefit of some snow when the rest of the country was throwing snowballs at each other and tutting about planes not taking off. When ITV News said that passengers at Heathrow were “angry, frustrated and confused,” I was jealous. That is basically my default position, but at least they had snow.

Still, I am grateful there was plenty of ice around, which enhanced my trip to work on Monday immeasurably, and brought new levels of complexity to my Flatley Dodge. Complacency is the enemy of the successful execution of the Flatley Dodge.

I am sure you are familiar with the Flatley Dodge, but if not, it is the manoeuvre one does when one accidentally blunders into an area liberally scattered with dog mess. One’s feet dance about, in a desperate attempt to avoid the horrible parcels of doom, putting oneself in more danger, which must then in turn be avoided. The effect to the onlooker is that of Michael Flatley in Riverdance.

This feat is difficult enough to perform on these twilit mornings on solid ground. The introduction of ice makes it almost impossible.

So I was feeling pretty smug as I reached the bus stop after a successful display of Flatley action, heroic even. I looked at the other passengers, and wondered, like Heather Small, what they had done that day to make them feel proud.

It was deathly cold. My breath hung in the air, white and puffy, like a speech bubble from the mouth of a cartoon character with nothing to say. I slipped my hand in my pocket to pull out my gloves and warm my numb hands, and 55p fell out of my pocket, one fat 50-pence piece and one little shilling.

I bent over and retrieved the 50p with my gloves on. Then I went for the five-pence piece.

I have written before about the difficulty of picking up a five-pence piece. And yet, here I was, trying to pick one up. It was Albert Einstein who said the definition of insanity was “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” In my defence, I had never tried doing it with thick gloves on before.

That didn’t work. So I took the gloves off, and tried again. For future reference, it is just as difficult with hands numbed by the bitter cold. I might as well have tried to pick it up with an amusement arcade grabbing claw made of sausages.

I could have left it there. Maybe I should have, as a reward for anybody who was able to pick it up – Excalibur, stuck in the stone.

But I was keenly aware that an entire bus shelterful of people had watched, with varying levels of interest, my attempts to pick up one lousy coin from the pavement. It was a dilemma: look like the sort of idiot who makes a couple of attempts to pick up a small denomination coin, then leaves it; or look like the sort of idiot who makes as many attempts as necessary to pick up a small denomination coin?

I made the decision, and went for the crouch. Five pence is five pence, after all. I tried a couple more times, scraping my poor fingers on the rough flagstones.

Then inspiration struck. I whipped out my Donot Card – the laminated card I made some time ago to ensure that, in the event of my death, I would not be the subject of a Facebook tribute page – and used it to scrape the coin towards the mortar between flagstones.

Then I pushed the corner of the card into the tiny gap under the coin, and flipped it up into the palm of my hand with a flourish.

I don’t think the other passengers were as impressed as I had hoped. If only they had seen my Flatley Dodge.

SO I have been writing my weekly column for four years now and I still have no idea if an individual column will be well received or not.

This week’s did quite well, so I had a look using my metrics thing to see which ones have been most successful and which would die, unloved, in a field off the M56.

Here are the top three, in descending order of popularity:

A Man Of The World, in which I try to buy The Sex Issue of GQ without anybody seeing me.

When The Train Comes In, in which I have to stand next to the toilet on a train from Newcastle to York.

The Very Surprising Doughnut, in which I discover a doughnut impaled on my front door.

And here are the bottom three, in ascending order of popularity:

Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer III: Electric Boogaloo, in which Father Christmas attempts rapprochement with his old colleague,

If I Had A Penne For Every Lie…, in which I try to open an “easy to open and reseal” bag of pasta.

Life Is Full Of Ups And Downs, in which the only other person in my lift expels wind through her bottom.

What I have learnt is this.

People prefer doughnuts to pasta.

People prefer women going to the toilet to women trumping.

People hate reindeers and Christmas.

Above all, I have learnt that sex sells, so I am going to change my byline picture to one of me in a gimp mask, and if you don’t like it that is your own fault.