The Covent Garden Soup Company still haven’t replied to my email complaining about their exploding soup. A wave of old gittishness engulfs me. Those fat cats pretending to be all cottage-industryey whilst they gorge themselves on the profits of their range of unreliable potage products.

Well I’m not buying their stuff again and may well phone personally to complain. And then they’ll be sorry.

TV is so full of inverted snobbery that it’s quite nice to sit down to Midsomer Murders, which is as middle class as you can get. So on Sunday night we veg in front of John Nettles, fresh from the same plastic surgeon as Kryten from ‘Red Dwarf’.

The plots are usually the same. Somebody is murdered in unusual circumstances, and their body is found by a man walking a dog. Later, somebody else will be wasted, invariably at a ghastly-looking ‘village event’, right in front of Nettles and his wife.

Everybody involved lives in a nice cottage. Several will be suspiciously rude and uncooperative with the police, for no reason whatsoever. Others will cast aspersions on the ‘locals’. These occasional characters, young, scruffy and often riding motorbikes, are not specifically referred to as ‘pikeys’ by the script, but the suspicion is that they are of vaguely gypsy origin and/or a threat to The World As Daily Mail Readers Know It.

Of course, these youngsters didn’t do it – far too obvious – although as a subplot they may well have been engaging in a little petty ne’er-do-wellism/secret good acts/banging the local landowner’s daughter etc. Rather, a fact comes to light involving an outrageous coincidence, Nettles’s wife’s interest in local history and some questionable leaps of logic, that leaves you cursing your naivety in bothering trying to work it out beforehand.

Of course it was the elderly local church historian spinster who’d killed the village rugby team with her bare hands, and Nettles regretfully arrests her after thwarting some mortal danger to his own family.

Cullie’s got a nice arse, but she’s so WET – you just… couldn’t.

This week it was all focused on witchcraft. What was all that about then?!?

The LTLP is waiting for me on my return from the market.

“I. Am. Really. Pissed. Off.”

I close the car door warily. This is not an encouraging phrase to hear, first thing on a Saturday and, more to the point, immediately after a visit to the hairdressers. Her hat is pulled down over her ears. We enter the house together.

“She. Has. Fucking. Ruined. It.”

I don’t know what to say. My mind races. On a purely selfish level, I am pissed off that the weekend looks like not being a fun one for me. Like a chess grandmaster, I try to work several moves in advance – is there any, any way that her getting a bad haircut could possibly be twisted to eventually become MY FAULT? I keep my face utterly neutral as I think, but I consider myself safe. I can’t be blamed for this.

I am also a bit weary at the drama-queen nature, as I know it’s not as bad as all that.

She removes her hat. It is as bad as all that. The highlights leap out from her haid with no degree of subtlety, and don’t quite meet in the middle, so she already has quarter-inch roots. She looks like a thirteen year old who’s been trying to doll herself up with her mum’s hair dye, in advance of going into King’s Lynn in order to hang around the shops with her kid.

AM I SMIRKING FOR GOD’S SAKE DON’T SMIRK

“Ummmm. You’re right. It’s disastrous.” What more could I say?

Later, we go into Lynn to buy hair dye. She keeps her hat on.