Apologies for the absolute lack of recipe cards this week but I’ve hardly been home to fanny about on my iPad, let alone have the time to make fromage frais sound like an inviting prospect. I’ve had nandos for my evening meal yesterday and Wagamamas for tea tonight. Can I just say, I’ve never felt like more of a fat bastard than when I staggered out of Nandos with five full paper bags of food. Admittedly I was buying for eight but who isn’t going to look and think ‘REALLY, WITH THOSE TITS’ at me. Bah. I’m not going to pretend I’ve made the right choices but my work has overtaken me for once! I’ll start anew tomorrow. But let me give you a quick take on my lunch today.

Normally, on the extravagant sixty minutes that my chains are released and I am free to leave my desk during the working day, I will go to a quiet place, like my car or the park, to read, sleep, eat dinner or imagine various psychopathic fantasies upon the various degenerates of Newcastle. However, today, I made the fatal error of venturing into town in order to pick up a prescription. In half-term week. Ugh.

There’s a shop in Newcastle called Fenwicks which you have to cut through the men’s clothing department in order to get to the food hall. It’s the worst possible experience for a fat bloke, let me tell you. It isn’t the clothes that are the problem, though – I have long since accepted that my clothes come measured in metre increments rather than inches. No, it’s the staff. The floor seems awash with those posing peacock men who strut around with their o-so-achingly styled facial hair and jeans so tight you can almost see their individual sperms wriggling around. Let me say something: men who have beards should be burly, rough men who thinking washing their arse is foreplay. They do not belong on ‘men’ whose idea of a bad day at work is someone raising an eyebrow and criticising the way they’ve stacked the XXS Fred Smith accent shirts. Perhaps I’m just jealous and/or paranoid, but it’s like an explosive decompression on a plane with them sucking air through their teeth as I blunder across the floor and they catch sight of my two year old Florence and Fred shirt, let out trousers and wide shoes that look like I buy them from Build a Bear. Such attitude! Such pretentious, sneering attitude and it is completely unwarranted. I’m reminded of Edina from Absolutely Fabulous who said ‘…and you can drop the attitude love, you only work in a shop’. Spot on. I have no problem with people working in shops, I’m not a snob – but honest to God, you’re selling the shirts, not designing them. You beanpole buggers. Lunch acquired, I went to get my MASSIVE DRUGS (betnovate actually, I have a tiny annoying bit of dry skin on my foot).

The pharmacy, of course, was full, and when a woman easily in her forties, with that pinched arse mouth look that you can only get from ten billion Sterling Blue hurriedly choked down outside of a Mecca bingo hall, wants to push in the queue because she’s in a rush…well she got short shrift from me. On top of that, I had to wait almost thirty minutes for them to spin the Medicine Wheel of Fortune and give me my bloody cream.

To top off that lovely hour, as I walked behind the building to climb the stairs into work, there was someone, not even a trampy looking fella, having a shit behind Sainsbury’s.

Welcome to Newcastle folks, stay all week.