This one is dedicated to that lovely lady who just rang my doorbell - she showed great perseverance, albeit coupled with a slight insensitivity

What are blogs for if you can't get these things off your chest.

So what happened? It's like this. There's a charity that is doing a bit of fundraising in our area at the moment, a good charity as far as I know and I would have been inclined to drop something into their envelope, if this lady hadn't annoyed me so much.

The way they go about it is that they put an envelope through your door so that hopefully you will put something in it and have it ready when they come to collect. But they don't tell you when they're coming, so it's a bit hit and miss. So far, not a problem to me. No big deal as far as I'm concerned.

But this lady turned up and rang my doorbell at an inconvenient moment - she couldn't know it, but I'm having a major flop day today and wasn't dressed so couldn't really go to the door. I looked to see who it was (aren't net curtains a great invention!) and that's how I know - and that's how I know who it was that stood there for a very long time ringing my doorbell again and again, which personally I think is extremely rude and inconsiderate. It's as if whatever I'm doing is so much less important than putting a pound in her charity's envelope. I think people who go from door to door can sometimes forget that they don't know what they may be interrupting. What if I was a tired mum who had just at last managed to get her baby to go back to sleep and was hoping for a five-minute snooze after a sleepless night? What if I was a shift worker trying to get some sleep before getting up for the night shift? What if I just had something on the stove that would burn if I left it for a minute? I'm sure if I carried on I could think of a zillion other reasons why ringing the doorbell half a dozen times would be extremely annoying.

It's a bit like those sales people who bang on the door as well as ringing the bell, which makes me feel like going to the door and saying: where's the fire?

Maybe next time I should.

How does the supermarket know I'm so special...

It's still a couple of weeks till my birthday but I got a birthday greeting in the post today. From my supermarket. So very touching... sorry if I sound a bit cynical, but really, it's nice of them to offer me a free box of chocolates (though in some ways it's the last thing I need...) but what narks me is the sentimental gibberish they put on the card: "Because you're really special, we'd like to make a fuss, by treating you to something sweet, especially on us." Well, really, I wouldn't have appreciated such twee mock-poetry from a friend, but from my supermarket? In what way exactly am I special to them? Do they particularly value the way I wheel my trolley round their aisles? Do they admire my own special way of choosing carrots?

But this is nothing compared to the pharmacy chain with whom I also hold one of those so-called loyalty cards (do they really think they can buy my loyalty by giving me one penny back on every pound I spend? I'm not that cheap!) - I hardly ever shop there, but I still get these ridiculous leaflets in the post with all sorts of money-off vouchers (usually for stuff that I have no interest in buying) which they claim to send me especially "as a valued customer". I look at those and think: aren't you confusing me with someone else? someone who actually spends more than the odd five pounds once in a blue moon when she's sort of stuck? I know for a fact that there are women out there who spend a small fortune regularly on make-up etc, so their "valued customer" threshold seems a bit low.

Thank God I don't need these corporations to give me a sense of value and of being special.