Never go to the supermarket on an empty stomach. As your blood glucose falls, the bright colours and bleeping will disorient you, the myriad choices will overwhelm you, and, worst of all, you will hear the carbs calling, calling. You will leave with enough noodles to start your own Thai restaurant and three family packs of sherbert-filled flying saucers.

This afternoon, I compounded this classic error by going to ASDA, grocers to Britain's underclass and subsidiary of the USA's Wal-Mart. This is Cambridge ASDA, of course, so our chavs have higher degrees in trailer park ecology and are only fat because they are doing evening classes in sumo wrestling. ASDA being a national chain, these subtleties of local demographics are lost to the central marketing machine, so what is obviously a nationwide joke by middle-class ad execs at the expense of the proletariat could be rumbled by its local targets, causing the company embarrassment. Remember: I am not making this up; if you are living in the UK you can read packaging identical to that I am about to describe to you in your own neighbourhood ASDA. Near to the shop entrance is the ready-made sandwich fridge. There are three ranges of product inside it, each with its own logo and colourscheme. The top-of-the-line takeaway food goes under the “Extra Special” banner, while the extra size and extra pure ranges are respectively labelled (in all-lowercase Helvetica) “go large” and “go simple”.

(Will someone explain why they are running a surreal promotion promising that, if I drink enough of their Ribena, I will qualify for a free inflatable donkey? Supposedly it has something to do with this movie, but I think someone just had an inflatable donkey surplus—they're less popular than the inflatable sheep perhaps?)

When I got home, still suffering from malnutrition, I couldn't find my mobile phone, but I'd lost the receiver for my land line so I had to page my home phone handset from its base, so I could call my mobile, so I could look up who had been calling me earlier and not left a message. It was me.