Today I am crabby. Co-worker is annoying me with much throat-clearing and harrumphing. Also I am sneezing and no one is saying ‘Bless you’, which for some reason is making me want to go home and sulk.

Other annoying things (today)
People who give their newborn sons old-man names. Alfred, Archibald, Wilfred. It’s probably done with the intention – conscious or not – of doing everything to prevent the kid growing up to be one of those hood-up, tracksuit bottoms, urban thugs who kick people to death and film the whole thing on their mobile phone.

I cry very easily. At songs, films, TV advertising jingles, newspaper stories about premature babies pulling through against all odds. But why in God’s name does any version of ‘Winter Wonderland’ make my eyes leak?

Speaking of leeks (sorry), I am scoffing a leek tart from my fave bakery in the world, Paul. Still crabby, though.

Star spotting: Bianca Jagger looking anxious/bored in the back of a parked Mercedes.

Weird: Last night I got off the bus and headed for Sparrows to pick up my regular fix of property porn, the Evening Standard Wednesday supplement. A woman was leaving and she stopped me with the words: ‘I recognize that face’. She looked familiar too. We exchanged a few words and established we were both from Wimbledon. Only as I was walking back to my flat did her name come to me, and I remembered that we’d gone to school together… until we were 11. Now, you’d think that a person would change a little in eighteen years, but obviously I look the same. Even wearing a hat, aged 29, in a winter coat, high heels, in the dark, I look the same. Admittedly I am now sporting the exact hairdo I had when I was 11, but whatever. Part of me is pleasantly amazed that she recognized me: it gives me an odd feeling of safety: here I am living in a city of 8 million people, and I bump into a woman I went to primary school with, in the cornershop. But it also really annoys me: like most people, I spent much of my teenage years trying to become the person I wanted to be, trying to shed my adolescent nerdiness. And nearly two decades later, an ex-schoolfriend glimpses me and knows straight away that I’m that 11-year-old she shared a tent with on a trip to the Isle of Wight.