Mr T happily regaled me with the various challenges he had to deal with over the festive period (his heating failed, a challenging visit from a nurse practitioner, the mystery of the Christmas lunch that never arrived...), and all this in the first five minutes of me arriving.

After a catch up that somehow went from black pudding (definitely not in the dessert section) to the joys of mackerel fishing, onto fisticuffs (not his, but a former sergeant) outside a Glasgow pub, and the beauty of the Isle of Arran, today's shopping trip proved largely trouble free, albeit sardines needed hunting down along Tottenham Court Road, and the Lidl queue was its usual semi chaotic self.