I need to watch what I buy online. For some reason purchasing stuff on the internet doesn’t feel like real shopping, and sometimes I surprise myself when something turns up in the post. It’s like the like button on Facebook with potentially more dire financial consequences. Having been made redundant recently (whoop!) I’d best watch I don’t book myself a holiday in my sleep, even if travel broadens the anecdotal repertoire of the immutably dull.

The other lesson I need to learn is that it always pays to actually read about the thing you’re buying. Take these new Asics running shoes i just purchased. Apparently they’re ‘unisex’. I’m not sure what possessed me to opt for a white pair – maybe they were cheaper than a black pair – though they’re the daintiest things I’ve put on my feet since I last played keepie-uppie with a cupcake. They’re not so much for running as for dancing through the streets of London like Cinderella. Every bound I take somehow makes me less manly, and I imagine people behind me pouring out of shops to laugh at the itinerant fairy. Though maybe they’re actually character building, in the way that Johnny Cash’s ‘A Boy Called Sue’ was character building. 

I went to step out in my delicate shoes (I’m not even sure if they’re meant for the road – they seem more appropriate for Narnian astro turf) when a family of cockernies passed by my door. My fear of being seen in my shoes made me recoil slightly in the doorway and as I did the matriarchal figure let out a mighty smoker’s cough replete with lung butter. Her husband turned to her and said: “That was so powerful you blew that man back into his house”.