Girls will, like, totally get this

7am, and there isn't any coffee in the house. Worse, there isn't any milk either, so I can't even have extra-strong tea. And heaven help us all if Beloved doesn't have a banana in his lunchbox! So off I go up to the local shops, having been out of bed all of ten minutes, wearing pajama bottoms that have seen much better days, a manky old Depeche Mode tour t-shirt (1987, if you must know) and a denim jacket with blobs of what looks like melted cheese but could be something much worse on the collar. My hair thinks we're all still in bed (and who am I to break the news to it?) and as for make up, forget it; my eyes haven't even opened properly yet.

All's quiet in the Co-op, so I've more or less got the shop all to myself, apart from a few friendly shelf-packers whose sartorial elegance is more or less on par with my own. At the till, I have the usual little chat with the lovely girl who works there, adapted to circumstance and time of day: how milk seems to magically disappear from the fridge, imagine a morning without coffee, etc. And then ...

"Well good morning. What are you doing shopping at such a ridiculously early hour?".

Now it could have been worse - it could have been someone I really, really fancy (or worse still, and ex who dumped me for someone glamorous). But the fact that it was a boy (to me, they're all boys until they hit the age of 30) that everyone at the theatre where I sometimes work fancies was good enough reason for me to turn completely, ridiculously pink and flustered ... which, of course, is sure to lead the boy in question to believe that I've got the hots for him, despite the fact that I'm happily unmarried to the long-term chunk of hunk who's snoring away in our bed, just down the road.

"BlahBlahBlah!," I waffle, trying to look pleased to see him. "You know - bleurghety bleurgh bleurgh!."

Okay, I will have managed to put some sort of polite sentence together, but it can't have been anything human-sounding. And anyway, regardless of what crap I came out with, his enduring memory of the whole event is more likely to be how (a) 'undressed' I was (when I turn up at the theatre, I'm usually wearing proper clothes), (b) how wretched I look without make up (and how much I must usually shovel on to not look this way) and (c) how mad my untamed hair actually is. He might also have been thinking, "crikey, what's that strange smell?" (the jacket hasn't seen soap and water in a long, long time). He, by the way, looked all sort of fresh, and polished, and ... well, catwalky! And he'll definitely, definitely be recalling the tale fo how he came across me this morning to everyone we share an office with right now, as I write.

He was buying cigarettes. "At least you're buying something sensible!", I trill, as I make a desperate attempt to get out of the shop without my pajama bottoms falling down (needless to say, I wasn't wearing knickers). At. Least. Your. Buying. Something. Sensible. What the hell did that mean???

Ah, but, you know; at least we had milk and coffee with our breakfast. And Beloved has his banana, too. I just hope he appreciates the humiliation I went through to get it ...