Ooh, I just noticed that it’s the first of April now. So Happy Birthday Jenny, don’t worry, I didn’t forget to buy you a present once again. And I’m going to do my usual trick to avoid being made an April Fool – stay in bed till the afternoon. It’s a cunning trick, but it works every year. Ho hum.

I was going to have a list of unanswered, or unanswerable, questions to start off with, as a clever lead up to the point I am about to make, but it’s more tricky than I first thought. I was one of those irritating kids who would always ask questions, and I know a fair amount about an awful lot of things. I know why the sky is blue, I know why the grass is green, I know why Mars is red … but I don’t know why we have two types of bulb fittings in Britain. There, I did manage to do the list thing. Ha.

The dodgy electrics in our house (ask Mr T, he likes them) are causing lightbulbs to blow at a fair old rate, and my spare bulb supply is running out (hey, if she’s not around to switch her bedroom lights on, she’ll won’t know the difference), so I decided to sally forth to IKEA, a good source of cheap stuff. It also gave me an excuse to go and buy all the bits of kitchen equipment that have gone walkabouts over the years (/me waves at everyone who’s nicked stuff in halls and flats – cheers guys) and generally look around. I really like IKEA stuff – it’s cheap, good quality, and my landlord wouldn’t dream of having any of it in his own house. That’s my new yardstick of seeing whether I like something or not. But IKEA is cool, I like the products, I like the business strategy, I like the ethos, I’m not all that keen on the advertising, but hey. And it’s only two bus journeys away from my house – the same number as my daily commute.

Rule number 1784 in life – don’t ever, ever mix the following things – Bus Route 112, Hanger Lane, the North Circular, 5.30pm on a Monday. I wasn’t thinking straight, or to be more exact, I wasn’t thinking at all. I can’t believe that people sit in that traffic every single day – well, I can, since I’ve seen them doing it. So it look a little while longer than I expected to arrive, having barefacedly lied about the amount of change in my pocket on the way in (‘scuse me mate, but my car’s broken down over there, and I need another £1.80 or so for some petrol – hmmm, last time I looked the minimum delivery was only two litres at less than a pound per litre, and he already had about a fiver of change in his hand).

Those of you who are on the ball know how this story is going to end, and so you can fill it in for me – I’m just too lazy. Those of you who don’t know what I was going to say, shame on you. There’s a clue in the first paragraph; the title is a mis-appropriated Microsoft-bashing joke being put to good use. It’s not that hard, but you might want to lay off the beer, vodka, glue, crack cocaine or whatever it is that’s causing your short-term memory problems…