Some people take coffee very seriously. ‘I need my coffee fix’ is a phrase I often hear, along with the terms ‘caffeine injection’ and ‘espresso boost’. I have always been slightly suspicious of people who can’t function without throwing a hot beverage down their throat. If you need to get your get up and go from a steaming hot Americano, what does that really say about you? Caffeine addiction is almost the slightly less strung-out and fucked-up cousin of crack addiction, isn’t it? And only just easier to manage.

I gave up caffeine about 9 years ago. I had bad skin at the time and was told ditching caffeine would help. It didn’t work miracles, but there’s a lot to be said for removing stimulants from your life. Around a year or so after, nicotine got the boot as well and I have to say that for a few years, I certainly slept better.

Living in London, I am exposed daily to a huge amount of coffee-based snobbery. Where you get your coffee says as much about you in London as your postcode, or car, or the label in the back of your jacket. I am told by coffee enthusiasts that by dropping into Starbucks every now and again, I am missing out on a true coffee experience. ‘How can you drink that stuff?’ is the incredulous cry from those coffee aficionados. ‘It tastes like shit; it’s not proper coffee.’ My view has always been that if someone has to grind some beans to make my latte (another coffee variation that gets a snort of derision) then it’s ‘proper’. But no, the coffee mafia would have me believe differently.

Proper coffee dens are on the increase in London. From Flat White to Monmouth to — oh I can’t even remember, there are hundreds — everybody is striving to be the next ultimate coffee champion. If you don’t drink coffee from one of these hallowed places, you’re not doing it right. There are whole books devoted to finding the perfect cup of coffee in London. Anyone who’s ever gripped an espresso cup seems to have an opinion on what coffee we should be drinking and how we should be drinking it.

But here’s the thing. A long time ago, I gave up doing things simply because a style magazine or a crashing bore of a know-it-all told me it’s what I should be doing. What if that’s not what I *like* doing? Until relatively recently, I didn’t even like the taste of coffee that much. The whole cappuccino fad completely passed me by, and I didn’t like the semi-crazed feeling I used to have after drinking one. All the so-called real coffees I’ve tasted take like burning embers or old ashtrays. A decaf latte from Starbucks every now and again tastes nice. I like it. I’d rather boil my own head in the piss of a horse with a severe yeast infection than spend any more than five minutes actually drinking in a Starbucks, yet I see nothing wrong with going there if I like it.

There is, of course, another side to this. That the globalisation of our high streets is pushing out independent businesses and traditional retailers is very sad, but times do change and businesses can’t be expected to last for ever. Evolve or die is the old adage, and even Starbucks can’t rest on its laurels; they’re having to introduce new styles of store after customers moaned that a) the decor of suicide brown and chipped tables wasn’t particularly salubrious and b) every store looking the same is kind of depressing.

So my simple message to anyone who slates my choice of coffee or the way I drink it: go buy your own then, before you wear mine.

Getting on buses. Striding onto tubes. Dragging my carcass on trains. It’s all I seem to do. Most of my travelling is heartbreakingly functional: 2 or 3 methods of transport per day, depending on which client’s office I’m working at, with only an unfamiliar desk and a stained mug awaiting me. It was this ‘métro-boulot-dodo’ dull existence that spurred me on to start going places more often. I don’t even mean those dull clichés like trundling down to Brighton for the weekend to ‘get away from it all’, only to find yourself shoulder-to-shoulder with every other Londoner who had the same bright idea. No. I wanted to go away. Away.

Luckily, a seed was planted when some close friends of mine moved to Barcelona recently. After giving up their London flat and fulfilling a long-held ambition to travel to South America, they have decided to spent around a year fulfilling ambition number two: to live in Barcelona. After that, it’s back to London to breed and read the Sunday papers and make casserole, but until that fateful day when they get to hear someone chirp ‘Mummy!’ or ‘Daddy!’ at them incessantly, they’re living the dream.

So a friend and I booked a trip to Barcelona. I may be a journalist, but I’m not a travel writer, so I can’t really wax too lyrical about its architecture (very nice), its climate (hot), its beach (sandy), the people (mainly smoking hot gorgeous), the shopping (like here, but more of it with a disturbing amount of beige) or even the service (serial killers are met with a warmer welcome in the UK). All I can say is that the very act of travelling only added to the experience.

I have always loved airports and see absolutely nothing wrong with wearing aviator sunglasses at all times in the terminal building. Ny fear of flying — which stopped me going almost anywhere for 10 years — has all but evaporated like Anthea Turner’s career and I now have a primal urge to go to other places and pretend to be someone else for a while.

Being somewhere else and experiencing not only the cultural bits that everybody dutifully does, like museums dead people’s houses and religious buildings, but also just acting as if you live there for a few hours is one of my favourite parts about travelling.

They say it’s better to travel than to arrive, but that’s nonsense. It’s better to travel and then to assimilate, clearly. So, where next shall I be extending my carbon footprint? Well, Aberdeen, as it happens but that, thankfully is quite another story.

Having just come out of an eight-year relationship in the New Year, I am a stranger to dating. In fact, it is a land I have never conquered: before my last relationship, my couplings were mainly made up of friends of friends or colleagues or fellow students or, after a long night in the uni bar, whoever was within arm’s reach. Behaving like a red-faced tourist from Ibiza Uncovered is all very well in your teens and twenties, but when your mid-thirties are standing over you with their arms folded ready to take hold, you have to be a little more civilised.

I’m constantly being told by smug articles in even smugger magazines that the best way to meet new people is through friends. That’s all very well, but when you share a lot of friends with your ex and have known most of them a very long time, it doesn’t somehow seem appropriate for you to expose yourself as some kind of sexual predator, hopping up onto a friend’s breakfast bar brandishing a cave cocktail and demanding to be ‘hooked up’ with some ‘hot friends’.

So, it’s down to the internet, then. When I told my mother that I was going to try online dating, she immediately revealed an intimate knowledge of the subject, gleaned from those weekly magazines that cost 50p and feature stories about people giving birth to their own eyes. Apparently, my mother said, it could be ‘anyone’ at the other end of the ISDN line: a murderer, a rapist or — even worse — a dirty old man lying about his age. I did explain that most people have photos up and that you don’t blindly wander off to meet them in a bar before even speaking to them, but she wasn’t to be convinced.

The key was which online dating service to use. One leading brand had been described to me as ‘being full of married men’. I always hate those soap shorelines where someone turns out to be having a gay love affair so thought it would be best not to live it for real. Another one I flirted with briefly was one that was totally free, for reasons that soon became obvious. I suppose having a pay wall means that only people who really ‘mean it’ get to meet up with you. On this free-for-all site I was getting attention from areas that I probably wouldn’t normally venture into the real world.  Even Gaydar looked like a site for true romantics compared to this seedy pick-up joint. The virtual me sighed deeply and realised I was going to have to take this seriously if I was going to get anywhere. With a heavy heart, I joined a dating website affiliated to a more liberal-leaning newspaper.

Preparing your profile for these things is quite a sobering experience. I lost count of how many profiles I read which started: ‘Oh I am useless at these things’ or ‘I’m not really sure what to write’. I was determined not to fall into that category.Why start with a negative? ‘I’m useless at this’ usually means ‘I can’t be arsed’ or ‘I have no social skills’ or ‘I just want sex’. I drafted my summary. And re-read it. I sounded a bit smug. I didn’t want to sound smug; I wanted to sound clever, but not stuffy or snotty. I threw it all in the bin. I tried again, this time lighter in tone and with a couple of one-liners here and there. Now I sounded like Chandler from Friends. Good grief.

And then I saw the light. I simply stopped ‘trying’. I just wrote whatever came into my head, tried to be clear yet still funny and, most of all, tried to sound attractive and that I’d be a good person to go on a date with. And now I had to write about who I was looking for, and choose from a series of options about physical attributes. OK well, hair colour was pretty easy. Eyes? Does anyone care about that? Er, height. Hmmm. How tall am I? How tall can I get away with? Ok, done. Age. Ah, age. A difficult one. I’m 34 but don’t *really* look it and I don’t think I’d really have anything to say to a 40-year-old that wasn’t a relative, and older gentlemen might want something a bit more serious than I was probably ready for. After careful thought, I set my upper limit to 37. And what about lower age limit? I decided it would be frankly ridiculous to say anything younger than 26, or I would feel like an old man, perhaps even one of those dirty ones my mother warned me about. After setting my preferences as if I were choosing a new puppy in a pet shop, I then moved onto the most difficult part: the photos.

I’m not particularly photogenic and I always seem to blink or pull a face at the wrong moment so candid photos of me are never a winner. About three hours later, I managed to find a deck of photos where I at least looked semi-normal, with a mixture of ‘moody’ (straight-faced) and ‘happy’ (straight-faced with slight twitch of eyebrow) and uploaded them.

I won’t say how it’s been going because this is not for public discussion but there have been some truly lovely guys who’ve been in touch. Sadly, the majority of the hopefuls who added me as a ‘favourite’ elicited many emotions other than elation, the primary ones being wide-eyed, hysterical laughter and the urge to throw myself under the 18.24 to Teddington.

St George’s Day has to be one of my least favourite days of the year. Much more so than a birthday spent covered in cold sores or Christmas Day with flu or two weeks in summer stricken by chicken pox. While St George’s Day has no adverse effect on my health, it seems to do something strange to a significant number of English people. In short: it turns them into idiots.

April 23 is, of course, the feast day of the patron saint of England, St George. A supposed dragon-slayer and almost definitely not English, St George is not so much celebrated as staunchly defended by his admirers. Quite what he has done to earn this unwavering respect is unknown, mythical lizard-murdering aside, of course.

National saints’ days have always struck me as rather odd. They were roundly ignored, as far as I can remember, at any school I attended, and when I lived in Edinburgh, very little remark was made on 30 November, which is the day everyone is supposed to get excited about St Andrew. The most national pride I ever saw the Scots display on that day was perhaps the wearing of a tartan tie or brooch. Certainly nobody roamed the streets singing ‘Flower of Scotland’ draped in the saltire and swigging a bottle of Buckfast. The Welsh, as far as I know, mark the occasion by wearing a daffodil or leek on 1 March, the special day for St David, but don’t really go any further than that.

In England, however, there’s an increasing urge by some people to mark St George’s Day and to give legitimacy to the idea that having a national day for some character out of a fairytale is the only way you can show pride in your Englishness. And whose fault is that? Why it’s that Guinness-swigging, foam hat-wearing, big-gobbed twat St Patrick, of course.

The Irish celebrate St Patrick’s Day as a national holiday. People actually get the day off. They thus do what most people do on a day when everyone is off work: they get drunk. It’s as much about St Patrick as it is about Daz washing powder. It’s just a national holiday. It’s become a worldwide industry, with sponsorships worth millions and just as many millions of ‘revellers’ globally toasting a snake-charming saint.

St George and his minions have observed this for quite some time, and has a touch of the green-eyed monster with peepers of a shade more emerald than a plastic shamrock hanging from a drunk’s hat. St George wants a piece of the action. Why don’t his English get the day off on his feast day, he wonders. Why are there parades and events in London to mark St Patrick’s prowess with pythons yet St George — who slayed a big, ferocious dragon, people — gets barely a mention, except in news reports about racists running around with English flags setting fire to mosques or whatever? Well, the answer is simple: a large number of those who do care about St George have reappropriated his flag and his name to raise that old chestnut about immigration and non-whites.

The myth goes that because non-white people living in England feel persecuted by the English flag, that it can’t be flown. Some white people, usually racists but otherwise just hopelessly misinformed, then use this oppression of their national saint to moan about non-white people living in England. It’s like a vicious circle; it’s a process so dull, predictable and laborious that it makes one want to forget how to read just so you don’t have to digest both sides of this dreary argument over a flag nobody really, if they’re honest, cares about.

What troubles the English is that they don’t really have a national identity. Their national song, God Save The Queen, has to be shared with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as the national anthem of the UK. They have no national dress to compete with Scottish kilts and, more importantly, a huge amount of English people don’t care. As England has been the dominant country of the UK for so long, they haven’t had to maintain traditions or reinforce their identity as a means of retaining some sense of culture. England, in trying to oppress the ‘other three’ for so long, has actually had the reverse effect and has almost voided its own national identity.

There’s something about the English flag and national pride that brings out the worst in people. A few years ago, during a World Cup, a primary school in my mother’s neighbourhood encouraged pupils to wear some kind of football strip or garment on the day of an England-Brazil game. My mother’s sister sent her dark-haired, dark-eyed daughters to school in the football shirt they had chosen in the shop: that of Brazil. The girls, aged 10 and 8 at the time, were chased round the playground by rabid England fans for supporting Brazil and even teachers castigated them and upon collecting them, their mother was told that it was ‘inappropriate’ of them not to support the national team or flag.

I do have a friend who takes every St George’s Day off work and spends it with her friends in the pub. They dress up as knights of the realm and other English icons and just have a laugh. They fly a flag and manage not to oppress any ethnic minorities and I think that’s great. But if only more people were like that.

This year’s St George’s Day lived and died for me on the pages of that nosey neighbour of the internet: Facebook. Facebook is the online equivalent of being talked at by a succession of people wittering in the post office queue. Trivial information, casual racism and ingrained prejudices whirr around it like a buzzing hive of mediocrity. On 23 April 2010 the site seemed to emit a red and white hue of seething anger, bitterness and resounding stupidity.

One Facebooker commented on the fact that her daughter had been called a ‘racist’ for waving a St George’s flag on her way to school. But how was she waving it? What was she saying? Why do people think you’re racist if you carry the flag? Is it because seven times out of ten, you usually are?

Another lamented they were the only person on their street to hoist a flag outside their home, while a commenter who had clearly sent his brain on a very long holiday remarked ‘Careful, it will offend the Muslims, LOL’ to which the flag-waving harpy replied ‘GOOD’.

This is the problem isn’t it? As it has been reported that the flag has been known to make non-whites uncomfortable, some people liked to use the cloak of ‘equality’ to antagonise and provoke a reaction. These England-lovers want to be branded a racist so that they, in turn, can project back at their accusers allegations of racism and unfairness. See, I told you it was boring.

I’m all for the celebration of Englishness and England and reclaiming the day of the national saint, no matter how bogus he may be, seems like a sensible option. But the use of it provoke or instill fear and hatred makes me realise that perhaps the English don’t deserve a patron saint. Maybe St George should tender his resignation.

If you have any sort of online presence at all, it’s important to remember that  everybody’s watching you. You are not writing in a diary, or scribbling a note down in the fiddly memo feature of your scratched mobile phone; you’re shouting from the virtual rooftops, laying bare your flaws to the world. And for every person throwing their words around, there’s at least three pedants waiting to jump on what they say.

Pedantry, for a while, became a lost art,. Wild exaggerations and faux pas were broadcast into the world and, nine times out of ten, nobody could be bothered checking the facts, save for a few hectored subs on newspapers. Now, however, with the advent of the dear internet, the whole world is your sub. And instead of ‘hello’, their greeting is usually ‘I think you’ll find…’ followed by a slamdown of whatever it is you’ve done incorrectly, be it a misplaced apostrophe, a strange verb agreement, or attributing the wrong year to the time when Donna Summer hit number one with I Feel Love.

The rise of the new pedant has been most entertaining on Twitter. Ah yes, Twitter. A useful social networking tool that has given so many compliments and such a great deal of importance bestowed on it by the world that it hardly knows what to do with itself. Twitter is a different animal from its forebears Facebook and MySpace in that famous people — and I’m not talking ex-Big Brother contestants here, but absolute bona fide BIG names — prattle on it as if they were having a conversation with someone in the same room. However, if this were a real conversation, it’s likely the recipient of the gossip would get up and walk out of the room, such is its inanity. No subject too trivial, no topic too dull. Just by logging onto Twitter and endlessly scrolling, you can find out what Ashton Kutcher wears to bed, what Simon Pegg had for dinner last night and even what Dame Elizabeth Taylor is up to later.

Such frankness should be applauded, but don’t forget our friendly neighbourhood pedant, purposefully stacking up his virtual lemons, ready to squeeze their vitriolic juice all over these celebrity updates. Get a spelling wrong and you’re history: King Pedant is just one click away, finger hovering over the @ symbol so he can start his diatribe. Made a throwaway comment about not understanding how people can’t like pork? Prepare for the Pedant’s Front of Judea to swoop down on you and admonish you for culture ignorance. Making a weak joke about Jesus being the first bloke to shop at B&Q? Woe betide ye, oh infidel, as a thousand earnest Christians tell you with a very straight face that Jesus’ ‘step-dad’ Joseph was a carpenter before Our Lord, so in fact Joseph would have been perusing the outdoor fairy lights and joinery long in advance of his son.

Sites like Wikipedia and Google have transformed the pedant’s armoury from a rather limp bow and arrow to an arsenal of machine guns and machetes. Cower as they wage war on inappropriate jokes! Swoon as they valiantly fight the battle of the ‘i before e except after c’ rule and, well, roll your eyes and log off at the sheer pathetic pointlessness of it all.

You could argue, and I probably would, that maybe if you don’t want to be picked up on your every word by someone called Colin in South Merton you should do one of two things: 1. Shut up. 2. Make sure you’re right. I am in the unfortunate position of being one of those people who hates to look stupid or ill-informed. If only more of my fellow humans had the same sensibilities. So, before I open my mouth or commit something to print, I do try to make sure that what I’m about to say will not make me look as if I have never picked up a book in my life. I know they say ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained’ but that doesn’t really wash when you’ve just claimed that John Travolta’s hair is all his own on Twitter, only to be regaled with 7,000 replies showing a zoomed pic of his unfortunate hair plugs. We all make mistakes — God knows I sometimes make them willingly — but if you’re going to show your foibles to an audience of, say, 10,000 people, don’t be surprised when two thirds of them come back to you within seconds pointing out your erroneous use of a hyphen when it should have been an n-dash.

The first encounter I remember with the number 99 was when I first saw it on the side of an ice cream van.

The proud cornet filled with soft, fluffy ice cream and crowned with a phallic, although later inspection would prove it to be rather short, piece of Cadbury’s Flake.

I didn’t really like the wafer that cornets were made of but nice cream and chocolate — TOGETHER — were a fascinating concept and I craved one. I was never allowed one. They were too expensive.

Expensive, yes, but not 99p, as I had mistakenly thought as a youngster. 99p in those days would have been rather overpriced, but 99p now is the ultimate bargain. There’s hardly anything you can’t get for 99p. No, seriously. If you have to pay more than 99p for anything, you’re being robbed.

I recently moved to a new area. Whereas my old neighbourhood was all ‘fine dining’ this and ’boutique hotel’ that, my new ‘ends’ (this is what young people say) have shops that are actually useful. No more bespoke dog collar shops or stores selling £400 vases; now every shop I see has the word ‘BARGAIN’ as part of its name. And king of the bargain stores is the imaginatively-titled ’99p stores’.

I remember pound shops from when I was a student. They were your first stop for oil burners that would crack in two within days, rag rugs, dreadful ‘sun and moon’ wall hangings and fish-shaped ashtrays. Their interiors were decorated with colours so unlovely that their creators must have been on the brink of suicide. That everything was £1 seemed too good to be true. It usually was. Most of it was junk that even a bag lady wouldn’t take off your hands.

In these days of recession, however, crap bargain shops have upped their game. Plundering former Woolworths’ sites and filling them with all manner of toiletries, long-forgotten confectionery and cereal brands, non-stick cookware, short-lived household innovations and, best of all, special mesh baking trays for cooking chips, the concept of a pound shop has been turned on its head, and had a penny slashed off its dress size into the bargain.

Since moving here, I have become obsessed with the two 99p shops near my new home. On my first visit, my mouth was actually agape at the treats on store. Even though I don’t buy that much, seeing brands that were given a lethal injection in the UK but survive in a Balkan state or two is quite a heartwarming experience. Remember Frisps? And Toffifee? They live again, like Bobby Ewing stepping out of the shower in Dallas.

Fancy getting your hands on some Polish Cillit Bang? What about a flavour of Mentos you never even knew existed? They’re all here waiting. And all it takes to get instant retail gratification is a pound coin.

The start of something new is always exciting. You can never recapture that feeling you have when experiencing something for the very first time. Your personal première.

Take moving to a new area, for example. For the first two or three weeks it seems as if there is literally no place more weird and wonderful on Earth, even if you’re not keen on your new surroundings.

New supermarkets are explored as if the Andes, local bakeries and butchers cooed over as if new babies, and your new pubs and restaurants bring a thrill second only to being seated next to Joan Collins at The Ivy.

Familiarity, as they say, breeds contempt. After a while, you begin to resent the fading of the freshness and the enthusiasm you once felt. Quite quickly, you realise that your local pub is actually a shithole frequented by tramps, hookers and estate agents. You’re bored by the same old places and faces. The local bakery that was such a ‘find’ has dubious hygiene standards. Your local butcher is a homophobic dunderhead with paedophile tendencies. Your local supermarket stocks the wrong kind of cous-cous. Everything turns to excrement.

And then you get comfortable. You start to love again your rough-around-the-edges local boozer, and the nightly stabbings are just an added bonus and a distraction from the karaoke.

There’s a reason why people hanker after ‘fresh starts’ and ‘new beginnings’, usually because they’re associated with the end of something that’s gone before. But there’s also a childlike quality about finding the new and different fascinating. There are so few genuine opportunities to look at things with a fresh pair of eyes and the wonderment of a child that we must grab them while I can.

When I move house next week, you’ll find me in aisle 3 of Morrison’s, gazing in awe at the selection of savoury rice as if Jesus himself had plonked them down on the shelf in front of my very eyes.