I DON’T know what is happening to this country, I really don’t. You would have thought that after the Covid years people would be happier, more content to have survived, but everyone is snarling and impatient.

I was walking around the Penny Pie Park gyratory when a car zoomed past me so fast it blurred.

‘He’ll never be able to stop at the traffic lights at that speed,’ I thought. I was right – he didn’t, just powered through the red light and thank god there was no one who took the green man as gospel.

Once upon a time I’d have an opinion, you’d have a differing one, we might have a discussion and maybe one of us would bend to the other and think ‘Actually you have a point’.

But now, there is only black and white, no grey, only ‘I’m right, you’re wrong and I hate anyone who doesn’t think like me and they should be painfully executed’.

People retweeting posts are getting harsher sentences than some murderers.

A government voted in to look after the ordinary man hadn’t even got its bum on the seat before it axed the heating allowance for the elderly. What a weird thing to do. George Orwell will be looking down and nodding. And then trying to contact his literary agency via an Ouija board to shift all the copies of 1984 from the fiction sections of bookshops to the factual.

Remember last week I told you about a mini market in Gawber where jams and buns and bric-a-brac were being sold for a few hours on Saturday in aid of BIADS and the Hospice, well that little stall netted well over £600.

Isn’t that just peachy. So thank you to the powerhouse that is Julia and Pauline ‘Kardashian’ Carnevale, Liz and Sharon and Jane: a lovely group of generous friends and neighbours. No doubt a lot of satisfied customers too. My dad used to think Julia’s plum jam was food from the gods.

I went into B & M this week, because there is nothing like a poke around there and buying all sorts of weird and wonderful things you don’t need to lift the spirits.

But I have to say, this was the one and only occasion that I came out empty-handed.

How can this be? I only went in for a specific big writing pad and found there were none. So into the basket went a load of other stuff I could have lived without, but when I got to the tills… people were queueing down the aisles with overflowing trolleys and there were desperate cries through the tannoy for Charlotte to get to the checkout immediately.

Maybe had my big pad been in my basket, I might have waited in line, but there was no way I was wasting another half an hour of my life to put some washing up sponges and Toffifees through the till.

So I had to retrace my steps and put everything back. I took a wrong turn and ended up IN THE CHRISTMAS AISLE.

Yes, you heard that right. I don’t want to think about advent calendars when I’m still waiting for summer to put in an appearance.

I don’t want to buy a Santa before I’ve even considered if I’m going to tart up the front of the house for Halloween. What is this lunacy?

A sense of depression followed me back to the car that time is just eating itself. My happy place just didn’t make me happy at all.

And I daren’t go back any time soon because I’m scared of finding Easter eggs.