1. See all the same shops/shop fittings/marketing flash/products. Am I in Aberystwyth, Birmingham or Penzance?

2. Get wet

3. If it’s earlier than, say, 9am, watch lots of obese people feeding crisps/chocolate/pastry products, to themselves and/or their cumbersome offspring.

4. If it’s later than, say 9am, watch lots of obese people feeding crisps/chocolate/pastry products, to themselves and/or their cumbersome offspring.

5. Smile knowingly, yet grimace in despair at the ‘hard’ men and boys who strut the pavements, spitting, ignoring their girlfriends/wives, making loud noises, lingering in the path of oncoming vehicles in order to express their ‘hardness’, getting in my way (emotionally, if not physically).

6. Watch people buying or wanting things they don’t need, for reasons they don’t even comprehend.

7. Buy some things I don’t need for reasons I can comprehend but appear to be powerless to resist.

8. Get wet again.

9. Get wound up so comprehensively by your own teenage offspring in ways that are fundamentally debilitating, but when asked to describe them you cannot even begin to string any words together that do anything more than make me sound like a petty, churlish and overly fastidious demon myself.

10. Bump into lots of people, most of us apologise to each other, regardless of whose fault it was. Some (Usually miserable or holier-than-thou looking, elderly people) fail to apologise which results in my either verbally abusing them or tripping them up within a few yards.

11. See and hear so many things that confirm my own status as both miserable and holier-than-thou, that at the first opportunity I consider tripping myself up.

12. Head for home with a few things I needed, many things I didn’t realise I needed until I walked down the street (silly of me), tired feet and legs, a tired brain, varying elements of dampness, many things I didn’t realise my offspring needed until I walked down the street (about the same time as she realised), muttered vows upon my lips such as “never again…” etc., the inevitable rumbling stomach, a desire to; a) be a hermit b)emigrate c)scream – though not necessarily in that order…