I went to Asda yesterday and found myself sandwiched in the queue at the checkouts behind a woman who was buying eight loaves of bread. It's as if the Atkins Diet never happened. I was going to suggest she try a bit of variety in her diet, but then I noticed she had three different brands, so she's obviously taken that one on board already. Maybe she was doing a taste test for Which magazine. Not that I could criticise - I was busy proving I have the willpower of a suggestible sheep by picking up two lollipops from the checkout display.

Anyhoo, talking of strange women, it's Lisa's Mum's birthday today. Naturally I'm a gentleman and wouldn't have dreamt of asking the lady's age, but fortunately for me, Lisa doesn't suffer from the same level of tact, and greeted her mother this morning with a resounding chorus of "Seventy-Three Today!". So that answers that question.

As a birthday treat, we took her over to Hove greyhound track for a bit of light gambling. It went well. For everyone apart from me, who had no winners whatsoever, and came away broke, broken, and considering a life of crime. I was brightened up slightly however by reading the small print in the programme and discovering that the headquarters of Coral dog racing are in Barking. It's the little things which make me laugh. After that, we made our way home via Burger King where Lisa's mother gave generously to the poor and needy by buying me a burger.

As it happens though, I'm not as poor as I thought. A week ago I took delivery of a consignment of unwanted jumpers which had come from Lisa's cousin, via her aunt & uncle, then her Mum, and finally reached me in a black bin-bag with the words "If you don't want 'em, chuck 'em". Naturally I won't throw anything out (apart from the hideous one which even Noel Edmonds would have rejected in the 80s), so I've been wearing one of them for the past week - one of two brand new jumpers from Gant. It was only yesterday, when I was about to shove it into the washing machine to get rid of the toothpaste, orange juice and milk I've been merrily spilling all over it for seven days, that I looked at the label and discovered it's pure lambswool and hand-wash only.

At which point I decided that maybe I should look up this 'Gant' on the internet. I like to think I have my finger on the nub of fashion (I managed to stay awake through 'The Devil Wears Prada'), but frankly I'd never heard of Gant, so I took it to be a dodgy market-stall misspelling of 'Gent'. I wasn't entirely right. Turns out it's designer menswear sold in Harrods. Which explains why I've never seen it.