What I learnt from a weekend spent in Suffolk's seaside towns

If you've reached the age where your hair is greying and unequivocally in retreat, where people react to the sight of you in revealing swimming attire much as they would to seeing a public marriage proposal being declined, yet you have a Someone to go the beach with in matching-but-different towelling robes, Someone to look out at the endless sea with in quiet contemplation of the unfathomable scale of Things and your ever-diminishing role in them, Someone with whom to wonder what happened to all that stuff you once planned to get round to, Someone to wait patiently for you to meticulously tuck your hair into a see-through shower cap, before you take your regular constitutional swim together…

…well, then I would say that you were doing pretty OK.

When good words join together to make bad words

There is much talk of make, do and mend at the moment. We are all being encouraged to grow, to stitch, to wash and to weld, in order to extend and reinvent the lives of old things, and deny the need to buy any new ones.

However, I see no reason that this creed of thriftiness should extend to words. It does not, as far as I am aware, cost anything to create new words. It is totally free, and the sky's the limit. There is no need to clumsily drive two old words headlong into each other until the life is crushed out of both of them, and we are left rubbernecking at a distressing etymological accident such as this, which I saw in the classified ad pages of a fashion magazine this week…

I am talking of the 'saress', a garment specially designed to be worn when people called Sarah are playing chess. Sarah Harding from Girls Aloud has the asymmetric version in the neon pink colourway. Sarah Palin has one with the stars and stripes on it, although she is still learning to play chess. No, wait. It's not that. The saress is a wildly practical combination of sarong and dress, and it is enjoying its fashion moment right now*.

The style press are some of the worst offenders when it comes to this type of caper. Their heavy-handed enthusiasm for forcing the suffix '-ista' into an unwelcome arranged marriage with any modish prefix going is exhausting. Fashionista, recessionista, frugalista, always with the istas.

If you are a follower of fashion, as I know you are, this mauling of the language is nothing new to you. You will be sitting at your computer or handheld telecommunication device wearing jeggings (what happens when a pair of jeans and a pair of leggings make fashion love and spawn a garment whose potential for unflatteringness – and that, I can assure you, is an actual word – is significantly greater than the sum of its parts). While you are reading, at the back of your mind you may be wondering if your shboots will hold up for another season, both in terms of the weather forecast, and the style forecast. Heh, I should totally work for women's magazines. Oh wait…

But forget the saress, the jeggings and the shboot. Because this time next year, everyone will be talking about the dungawrong - my own sartorial cocktail of sarong, dungarees and ill-conceived wordplay. When you see some young style pioneer like Rihanna pictured out on the town in a few months in an oversized tea towel held up by braces, a capacious, central two-hander pocket to the front, don't forget where you heard it first.

*No, it is not.

Lunch-hour dispatches

1) You join me in Cos, a place I am increasingly resigned to calling The Shop That Got Away.

Actually, that would imply that there has, at some point, been a connection between us, and my recurring failure to find anything I would like to buy in there is just a melancholy case of faulty timing. The fact is, Cos and I simply have no chemistry whatsoever – and we never have. And sometimes, this just happens between a woman and a merchandiser. On paper, we are nothing but compatible. We should gel perfectly. I am the right age, I have the right job, I have the non-standard shape that should be perfect for its boasts of superior tailoring at mid-budget prices. I even have the mid-budget for the mid-budget prices. Sometimes, though, sometimes the sparks you're desperate for just do not fly, and you are left slumped, alone and unsatisfied, in the changing room with your clothes on the floor, and a fine-knit jersey dress around your ankles, wondering what exactly didn't go right this time.

However, it is important not to take this personally, and be plunged into the deep, deep well of Retail Self-loathing. Instead, I am resolved to look at myself in the fitting room mirror and repeat this self-affirming mantra 10 times:

'I am a special and worthwhile shopper and I am remembering how jealous people are of the really cool stuff I always find in H&M.'

Anyway, this particular lunchtime in Cos, I was met by a dummy whose body language I can only describe as hostile.

It was as if she was saying, 'No. You have to leave. I can't go through it again. I'm just so tired. Leave now and save us from any more awkwardness and heartbreak.'

It's either that or

a) she's consumed with silent fury at having to pose in front of the unflattering backdrop of a yellow skip. Seriously, yellow is really hard to wear. The unworkable clash of my pallid complexion and the joyous colour of sunshine and buttercups and Norwich City is the greatest fashion cross I have to bear. The fact that the sight of me in skinny jeans – if they can even be prevailed upon to stretch up and over my knees – is enough to cause permanent blindness to anyone unfortunate enough to see it is water off a duck's back in comparison.

b) when the sun came up this morning, causing her to freeze in the middle of whatever nocturnal activity she was engaged in (all tailor's dummies come alive at night – you will know this if you have ever seen the documentary Mannequin presented by Andrew McCarthy), she was practising the dance routine to Biology by Girls Aloud.

2) This is the future of the Post Office.

It is a machine that helps you post your letters and parcels without the need to queue up for the best part of an hour to be served at a Actual Counter by an Actual Person. While I am a fan of any benign automaton, I can't help feeling that this striving towards efficiency and swifter customer service will deprive us of the endearing/frustrating foibles of a British institution. In order that these vital minutiae of British life should not be lost, I am hoping that the machine will suffer sporadic 10-minute delays while messages are flashed up saying things like, 'Please wait, a senior citizen is telling me in detail about her ulcer'; 'Would you like to buy a DVD copy of Licence To Drive starring Corey Haim and Corey Feldman for £4.99?'; 'Please wait, the customer in front of you wants to send 20 packages of assorted size to the Philippines'; 'Can I interest you in the post office's pet insurance policy. It's extremely competitive.'

In addition, ambient smells should be emitted from the machine at various intervals, in an initiative earlier adopted by the Jorvik Centre, but in this case conjuring up not the aroma of a viking settlement, but the heady scent of the great British post office queue, including Unsuccessfully Radiator-Dried Laundry, Oniony Sweat and Whiskas.

Stupid posh men

Hello, middle-aged man in navy blazer and pinstriped shirt, standing behind me at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre bar on Friday night, thrusting your vile self forwards by shoulder-barging my mother, 65, out of the way, then lunging your arm over my shoulder and waving your £20 note across my face in an attempt to be served before me, even though I had been standing there an awful lot longer, as evidenced by the fact that I was actually in front of you. Yes, you, calling for the bartender's attention as though she was some deliquent canine. I never knew it was possible to be simultaneously summoning and dismissive. I imagine this to be a source of pride to you.

Hello, different middle-aged man in blazer and pinstriped shirt, same repulsive air of superiority and entitlement, two bouffy-haired, Fauntleroy-style sons in tow, at the door of the Albert Hall on Saturday night, ignoring the queue of rain-blasted people waiting patiently to have their tickets checked, and striding straight to its head. Yes, you, talking loudly to the increasingly flustered but admirably principled usher about how your wife is ONE OF THE SINGERS tonight and you HAVE TO get to Box 3, then responding to their meek and very polite request that you go to the appropriate entrance for that box, or indeed the stage door, with an immediate demand to SEE THE MANAGER.

You are both bastards.

Out with the old

I'm reaching the end of a marathon work stint in the Wapping compound. I say marathon. It is nine weeks. But everyone knows that one freelance week is roughly equivalent to five years of permanently employed service. So I will be expecting at least an engraved Parker Pen on my departure on Friday, not to mention a lukewarm and resentfully attended sparkling wine/cocktail sausage desk buffet.

Will I miss newspaper publishing's very own open prison? I certainly won't miss my computer, where the time delay between my fingers hitting the keys in pursuit of email composition – which I like to do a lot, and fast – and the words appearing on the screen is so slow and bunched up I perpetually feel like it's 1980 and I'm typing on the Grandstand videprinter.

I will, however, miss the nearby Waitrose coffee shop, which has been my only true friend during this difficult time. Today, to heighten my looming sense of separation anxiety, the till operative gave me two free chocolates with my tea. Two! One is a customer courtesy; two is kind of a big deal. In reality, I'm fairly sure it was a result of the eyeroll we shared over the hugely rude SmugMum who had been served just ahead of me.

Lately, I have noticed on several occasions the same elderly man having a cup of tea and taking in the papers of a lunchtime. A few days ago, he was sitting next to me on a high-stools/high-table-along-the-window arrangement, making truly the most phenomenal amount of noise eating an oatcake, which he had brought in from home wrapped in kitchen roll. It was a symphony in sucking and mastication, performed with the mouth. You would not have thought that much moisture could be extracted from an oatcake, but good lord, he was a terrier about it.

Ordinarily, I could not have stood for this feat of noisy eating. There would have been, on my part, geriatricide; on his, no more eating of oatcakes. If there was not actual murder taking place, the Waitrose cafe would have seen at the very least some Olympian tutting, and me sliding off my high stool with clumsy froideur to move somewhere closer to the obliterative roar of the cappuccino machine. But, readers, surprise is a very powerful thing, and my emotional achilles heel is a very weak one, and it is in essence men of a pensionable age sitting on their own in coffee shops. I've said it before, but it is, for me, a 100% sure-fire Random Cry Trigger.

Why was he such a powerful specimen? It probably had a lot to do with his nose, which was Roman, and very much like my grandad's and my dad's and mine, physiognomy fans. But most probably it was his feet, resting uneasily on the bar of the table in front of us, trousers being hoisted up bony flagpole shins by the awkward, forward-sliding posture demanded by the stool. It instantly referred my brain to an image from my younger teenage years that I can't seem to forget – a man being given desperate CPR in the back of an ambulance. I remember two things in particular – the up-and-down arms of the paramedic, engaged in furious chest compressions, and a pair of feet in brown socks and men's sandals dangling lifelessly over the end of the bed. I also remember, as the ambulance pulled away, doors slammed and sirens blaring, my dad saying sadly, and almost under his breath, 'Good luck.'

(In today's parentheses of emotional self-indulgence, I wonder a lot if other people are haunted by seeing this happen to my dad, as I am haunted by this image of someone else's loved one slipping away.)

Come back! Bereavement Two Minutes is over. We're back in Waitrose. And I was taking in my cafe neighbour's gardening-tanned hands and wondering if he had a shed, I had an epiphany and it said a) I must remember to buy some milk before I go back to the office, and b) this borderline fetishism of old people and their lifestyle is possibly slightly weird.

What with this, and my nascent friendship with Lambeth Horticultural Society, and in particular the brilliant Valerie (who may actually be 25 for all I know), I have begun to wonder if it might be healthy to try associating with more people of my own age. I put this to Miss W during a multi-faceted email exchange. Diplomatically she did not reply to that particular thread.

More evidence. Another thing I will remember fondly about this job is the extremely hot lawyer who strides through the editorial office on his way from the outside world to his own glass-walled cell, expertly navigating the assault course of shoes and garments laid out on the carpet by the fashion department as they prep for shoots. To the ingenue, these constitute quite the health-and-safety hazard ('Have you had an accident in the workplace? Tripped over an embellished platform stiletto? Skidded on a shimmering parachute silk jumpsuit? Call Fashion Injury Lawyers 4 U' etc). What I find hottest about him is not his many impressive physical attributes but his speaking voice. Today, however, I realised he sounds a lot like Cliff Richard.

In addition, where did I spend my Friday night? Not taking crystal meth at an underground Dalston speakeasy, but blissfully browsing around the Crayford branch of Hobbycraft.

What comes next? A subscription to the Daniel O'Donnell fanclub and fanatical crocheting?

It is a worry.

In which I am confused with Robert Smith for the second time in my life*

Miss L and I were pedecommuting from London Bridge to Wapping this morning, and as we were striding along the South Bank, we were stopped by a middle-aged Japanese couple brandishing a camera. But before we could argue about which one of us would take their picture for them, the female half of the pairing had whipped us round with surprising strength for someone of her stature, and was beaming at the camera with an arm locked around each of us, while her husband snapped away and we wore rictus grins of baffled surprise. As we broke apart, still a little dazed, Miss L asked if they would like us to take a picture of them together, perhaps against the popular backdrop of Tower Bridge. Affirmative, seemed to be the response, but before we knew it, we were being grasped by the male half of the double act, and again making a tourist sandwich for the camera. Still, we nodded and beamed our way through the breakdown in communication, and carried on to work, speculating on why we were such irresistible elements of the composition.

In the office, Amy, who I sit next to, who is lovely, and about five foot ten, said it's because Miss L and I are tall, and the contrast between us and the Japanese couple makes for prime photo-album fodder. But I am not that tall. I am only five foot six, which is at best the taller end of normal, and not even tall enough to be a model, which is unfortunate, because at the moment that's the only thing holding me back.

So what was it? It's not like we're dressed as beefeaters, I thought to myself. At least, not intentionally. It's not like we're punks. And then, as I thought of my pale complexion, and my dark, dark, hair, and looked down at the thick black tights I was wearing, which had been gently derided earlier by Miss L for getting an outing in July, I had an unwelcome epiphany.

Perhaps, just perhaps, they thought I was a goth.

That reminded me of living in halls in my first year of university, and how a boy called Andy, who lived downstairs, would habitually call me Robert Smith. Robert Smith of wild hair and delinquent lipstick. Robert Smith of The Cure. Robert Smith of the male half of the species. Now I write it down, it seems like I should have been annoyed, or angry, or upset, or furiously remonstrative, but he did it in such an affable, matter-of-fact way that I just wasn't. Maybe once I might have countered weakly, 'I really don't look like Robert Smith.' And it was as if I had tried to claim that the sun didn't really rise every morning. 'You're so Robert Smith,' was the calm, apparently definitive reply.

I think there is a reason it didn't really bother me, and that is because when I was about 15, which is a vulnerable, fumbling, finding-your-way age, someone - an older person, a person I trusted - told me I reminded them of Su Pollard. I think you will agree that next to this, being compared to Robert Smith is virtually a compliment. And it is that from which I have never fully recovered.

*perhaps

Owls and aubergines

Back at the Lambeth Country Show, the competitive baking, the Mr Whippee vans, the alpacas, the sheep-shearing, the dubious crafts, the bowel-bothering, bass-heavy sound systems, the medieval jousting and the sheepdogs chasing herds of ducks up and down a miniature slide are all just so many support acts before the two main attractions:

Owls

and

Vegetable sculpture.

Malheureusement, it was not a good weekend for owls. Humans cannot perform thrilling aerial acrobatics when it's gusty, and nor can owls. In addition, they have a peculiarly sensitive artistic temperament, particularly when it comes to the big occasion. "Look at Tiger," said the owl wrangler, in a strong West Country accent, of one of his starlets. "He's a bag of nerves. He's never flown in the big arena before."

If you ask me, Tiger had had enough of his human sidekick giving out cheap, crowd-pleasing chat like this: "Right, kids. Who likes to go to McDonald’s? Who likes burgers? Chicken McNuggets? Yes? Well, owls would like to go to McDonald’s if it was RAW.’

Here is Tiger, his face bleak with contempt.

Meanwhile, in a tent on the other side of the park, red-hot vegetable modelling action. You might expect that the recent demise of Michael Jackson had inspired many artistic endeavours. You would not be wrong.

Yet neither will you be surprised to learn that the judges were not to be swayed by the gimmick of topicality. Here is the more classically inspired victor:

But wait. What is her hair made of? IT IS MADE OF WOOL. Instant disqualification, surely, and a failure of imagination on the part of the artist for not turning to some moulding asparagus, for example, to give similar colour and texture.

Here is second place. Excellent use of engraved watermelon to provide a tortoiseshell effect:

And here is third, apparently a tribute to Wilf Lunn, at least in terms of facial hair. I could not say if Wilf smokes a pipe.

But let us not forget the children, as they are our future. Teach them to make vegetable animals well, and let them lead the way. Also be there to mop their tears when one of their creations literally falls off its perch [below, extreme right].

I would also like to highlight the show's competitive floristry wars, with one category of exhibits themed around a West End musical.

Here is 'Cats'. You can see that the artist has used a china cat to suggest the musical Cats, and also a card that says Cats on it.

And here is 'Wicked'. Thrillingly, at the edge of the frame, you can catch a glimpse of one of the tent's security personnel, tensed like a jungle cat, ready to pounce at the first sign of a riot. The crowds at the Flower Show can be large and unruly, particularly in front of the vegetable modelling entries, where there's more push and shove than the opening of Primark Marble Arch. You may think that the cord around the security agent's neck is attached to her glasses. It is actually holding a lightweight Taser.

Finally, if you are moved to enter a category at next year's show, might I suggest marrow growing? Look at the sole entrants, and the over-ambitious table space that has been allotted to their no-show rivals.

They look as glum as the last two marrows to be picked for marrow football.