I have had no salt for a couple of months. I don’t know how anybody has salt. Nobody remembers, in the middle of Tesco, that they need salt. Other than people who’ve made lists, obviously. But that’s cheating. Far more fun to get home and realise that yet again you slipped into the fluorescent netherworld befuddle bubble, and although you’ve got bacon, which you never eat, and chicken sauce, which you’ve got nine of already, the concept of salt was lost to you for those forty minutes. This was me last week:

• 1100: Right. Today shall be different. I’ll be in and out. Quickly. No worries.
• 1105: Did that announcer just say ‘good morning customers?’. Shall I shout ‘ho-de-ho’? Better not. Why is that person giving me a funny look?
• 1110: There are many people in front of the bananas. I’ll loop around the salads and come back.
• 1111: Strawberries! No. Mustn’t.
• 1112: Are those…the same people? The same people? HOW LONG CAN IT TAKE TO CHOOSE BANANAS?!

You know how irritating it is when the person ahead of you decides to pay by cheque / forgets their pin / can’t find their wallet? A while back I started counting how long these procedures actually took. I reckon it rarely adds more than twenty seconds. I had the same thing with Hettie the arrival-time-predicting sat-nav: traffic-jams that seemed to take hours to clear only added three minutes to the journey. I’ve decided I can’t be bothered getting annoyed at ‘wasting’ anything less than fifteen minutes, and it’s impressive how much calmer my day becomes.