Just when I think that I’m running out of things to blog about, I go and lock myself out of the house. What luck!

However, I AM rather busy. Hence the morning rush to the village shop.

I stand back and give the side door a hard stare. At times like this, it is important to keep calm and gather together all the facts. So:

The door is definitely closed.

It is definitely locked.

I definitely do not have a key.

My dad definitely forgot to replace the spare key when he went home on Monday.

The LTLP will definitely be home in (checks watch) nine-and-a-half hours time.

I study the lock closely, giving it a little wiggle. It’s a cheap one, and does not seem to have some form of fail-safe opening-from-the-outside device, for people that have forgotten their keys. This is clearly a design flaw.

I examine the tools at my disposal. I might be able to rig something together in order to effect an entrance. Available to hand are the following:

A garden chair

A copy of The Guardian newspaper

Some loose change

Three chicken fillets

A courgette

It’s annoying, but always the way. Had I been loafing in front of the TV, watching some ‘I’m locked-out and only have a chair, some money and some groceries’ type game show, I would have been shouting out the obvious solution to the hapless contestant. Here, actually IN the high-pressure locked-out situation, my mind goes blank.

The letterbox is quite large. I have quite thin arms, to go with my head, and I roll up my sleeves to make an exploratory grope for the handle on the inside. It’s tight – very tight – and the analytical percentage man in me warns me to withdraw. The locked out situation is bad, but at least I am locked out without my arm being stuck in a letterbox.

Hang on! I’m sure we left a spare spare key next door, some years back. After the LTLP, being a stupid woman, went out without her keys.

I go next door to Short Tony’s. Short Tony is very busy, but sympathetic. He can’t find the key, but he does kindly lend me his lawnmower. That will kill some time.

I mow the lawn. Really, really slowly. By the time I finish we have the carefullyest-mown lawn in the village. I check my watch. LTLP due back in nine hours.

I ring my dad, ostensibly to double-triple-check that he hadn’t left the spare key somewhere accessible after all, but really to make him feel bad. He sounds contrite, but at no point in our conversation does he offer to make the three-hour drive up here to let me in. Pensioners!

I sit and read the main bit of the paper. All of it. Even the long intellectual bits about the West Bank and stuff. The sun is out, it’s a beautiful day, and I start to relax a bit. Only eight-and-a-half hours to go.

I begin to regret the three early-morning cups of tea, and knock shamefacedly on Short Tony’s door, asking to use the toilet.

I offer to mow Short Tony’s lawn, which he gracefully declines. He accompanies me back, with some tools, which prove not to be any help whatsoever.

But I can see that he’s got an idea.

At the bottom of the side door is an old catflap. Some previous owners, presumably, had a cat. It is sealed up, badly, with cheap hardboard. He examines it closely, then stands and turns to me.

“What we need,” he says, very slowly and thoughtfully, “is an extremely well-trained cat.”

I sit and read the second half of the paper.

The spare spare key was on Short Tony’s kitchen table all along. His wife got home from work at lunchtime and found it within thirty seconds. So it was all his fault!!!

The lawn looks nice.

I meticulously transcribe her name on to my List of Enemies.

The. Phone. Answering. Lady. At. Serviceteam.

There. That will teach you, Phone-answering Lady at Serviceteam. Come the revolution, you will be made to pay well, alongside the marketing people at the Covent Garden Soup Company, and Person-in-Charge-of-Bulk-Email-Database at Egg.

(Of course it’s a mental list really. I wouldn’t be so stupid as to keep it in writing. Just in case.)

Clearly I would also need to do something about the Rumsfelds, Sharons and Worrell Thompsons of this world, but I will cross that particular bridge when I have the priorities sorted.

My mind rewinds through our conversation. Her utter indifference to the recycling crisis currently engulfing the village, and the total faith that Serviceteam had got the date right and EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE STREET had got it wrong.

The lady at West Norfolk Council was also useless. But she sounded genuinely upset that a mistake had been made and that we, the public, had been inconvenienced. And that makes a difference, you see.

Customer service people everywhere take note. Listen, and ye shall all have opportunities in my new world order.

The recycling men haven’t been!

They should come every two weeks, but our last collection would have been on Good Friday. So they rearranged for the Friday just gone. But didn’t turn up. Nor on Saturday. Nor Sunday. So it’s just sitting there forlornly at the end of the drive.

I have had to allocate an overflow box for the extra week’s copies of the Guardian. So THIS is what it was like during the Winter of Discontent!

I took a small piece of packaging out there this morning. Before I stuffed it in, my eye caught the slogan on the front.

“A delicious source of milk goodness”

Guess where?

On a milk carton?

Nope.

On… on something else milky that you would expect might be good for you?

Nope.

On the box from the Milky Bar Easter Egg that I was kindly given last week?

Yes. And what I can’t… what I struggle to… I just – well, I didn’t get annoyed because the whole world’s getting porky and this wasn’t aimed at helping. Or because I thought Trading Standards shouldn’t allow it, although possibly they shouldn’t.

It just makes you depressed because it’s such obvious, obvious, laughable bollocks. It’s not true, they know it’s not true, we know it’s not true. But we’re in this rut as a human race that we’re utterly blasé about churning out and accepting shit.

“A delicious source of milk goodness”

Person who briefed it to a marketing agency. Person who wrote it. People who decided it was good. People who presented it back to some more people. The 2378242 executives who approved it. Person who designed the box. Typesetter. Production manager and printers. Supermarket buyer.

Have none of you any dignity?!?

Delicious egg, however.

My Sunday newspaper wasn’t there again. Plucking up courage to walk to the shop.

Go and read Nutgroist.

Nutgroist wants more readers. And more readers should read Nutgroist.

So that’s a win-win situation all round.

Back tomorrow.

I go for a run.

Turn right at the gate and up the street. Run, run, run, run, run!

I head down past the shop and through the Lane, gracefully leaping the dog shit as I go. Leap! Leeeeeaaap!

I try to do this most days. In my pocket I have my MP3 player. It’s an extremely fine one at the moment, but give it a year and the local kids will be pointing at it and laughing.

Choosing the playlist is critical. Can’t be too uptempo, you see, as you jog with the beat. We runners know such things.

Run, run! My Matalan tracksuit cunningly retains the sweat, thus stopping my skin from drying out.

I turn left, past the spooky disused church. Run, run run! Leeeea… oh, bugger.

Run, run! Music bellowing in my ear. ‘Like a burrrrrdd on the wiy-errr… like a drunk in a…’.

It’s just over a mile in all, and I arrive back wheezing for breath but alive and well. I don’t have time to do it twenty-five more times, as my mum and dad are staying, but I don’t reckon it would be much of a problem. And people make such a fuss about preparing for the London Marathon.

My mate Tink completed the London Marathon last year. He was really chuffed. Then they gave him his official finishing photo, which showed him being overtaken by two blokes dressed as a giant millipede.

I totter in, and wish the cottage had a shower.

My Norfolk strapline has dried now, and I think I’m happy with it.

Although I had a major gittishness event yesterday morning, trying to sort out my permalinks. WHY don’t they work? WHY? WHY? HELP ME SOMEBODY PLEASE HELP ME HELP

The only problem I have with the ‘blogging from a small Norfolk village’ concept, is that I have a horror of turning into Will Buckley.

Our paths so far have been very similar. He left the metropolis and moved out into the Norfolk countryside for a better quality of life, and to work from home.

He then started to write a column about it, for The Observer. Again, a parallel, although editors of the national press’s ‘media pages’ (and God, I’ll write about them one day) might like to note that my circulation is growing somewhat faster than The Observer’s, year-on-year, in percentage terms.

It was gentle humour. Slightly smug, but inoffensive. The sort of articles that you’d find in a rubbish local magazine, under a crap header like: ‘Will Buckley explores the lighter side of…’ or ‘Will Buckley takes a wry look at…’

Unfortunately for him, journalists don’t write the headlines. Bored sub-editors fulfil this task, and as it’s one grillion percent more interesting than the rest of their job, they go to town occasionally. So when the first article appeared under a banner the gist of which was ‘In the land of the three-headed cousin fuckers’ there was a certain amount of local interest.

The subsequent retraction/explanation/apology was a masterpiece of contrition and ‘please like me again’, and I warmed to the man immensely. I understand that people speak to him now, and his kids have stopped being wedgied at school.

You can see my dilemma. I make a big thing of life round here being uncomplicated, friendly and rural and immediately it sounds like I’m taking the piss.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I like uncomplicated, friendly and rural. Uncomplicated, friendly and rural is good. Not in a sneery ‘isn’t that quaint’ metropolitan way. If you want that, go read somebody else.

Oh dear, I’ve gone all serious. Better write something funny tomorrow.

I have not got a big head.

Physically, I mean. The size of it. Although ego-wise, I don’t have a big head either. I am not good at taking praise. Shy. English.

So you see, I have not got a big head in any capacity, neither physical nor mental.

I used to work with a guy who drew caricatures. He had this incredible skill of summing up the essence of a person in one or two brush strokes, and a finished cartoon would encapsulate not only the subject’s appearance, but their entire life history and what they had for breakfast that morning.

Except that when he picked me, he drew me with a big head. Blind spot, you see. Flaw in his technique. We were perhaps too close. In retrospect, I think it’s why he never got anywhere. Not much good at heads.

If he had been drawing Kelsey Grammar or Juan Veron then fine. But drawing me with a big head just made him look a fool.

I went to a wedding on Saturday. An old and dear friend of mine. She married a chap who I haven’t met often, but who seems like a top bloke, despite the fact that he’s just spoilt yet another back-up plan should the LTLP finally crack and desert me for a more attractive proposition. (I have to be pragmatic – there could be many better men out there – richer, better in bed, larger heads, etc.)

Anyway. They had a caricaturist at the reception.

Now, it strikes me that a jobbing wedding-reception caricaturist requires two major attributes in order to achieve success.

- A friendly and chatty disposition, able to get on with people

- The ability to draw caricatures

So when I tell you that this man had neither, you can probably see where I’m heading.

He scowled at his subjects. Grunted. Told the people at the end of the queue to eff off, as he was going home in ten minutes. All in all, somebody who should jack in the job for a role, say, working behind the counter at a Central London Post Office.

It probably didn’t help that everybody was openly laughing at his work.

The ladies all looked the same. That is, take a ‘Rachel from Friends’ wig, balance it on a hamster mask and glue on two chins of lard. His woman-hatred shone through with each vicious stab of the felt-tip.

The men got better treatment, but still emerged bemused and shaken by the experience. And all around the venue there was the crackle of latent domestics, as pissed-up bridesmaids demanded their husbands’ reassurance as to whether their cheeks were really puffed out and swollen like that.

And he drew me with a big head.

See?

Proof.

I have not got a big head.