I realise that I haven’t blogged for a few days and have probably left you in suspense over Tescogate. I have forgotten where we left off. I told you I was sent out of date cheese. I was promised by Tesco, that a store manager would ring me to explain what has been going wrong. Despite not letting my mobile phone leave my sight all day, no telephone call was received. Great customer service! I contacted Tesco, who offered apologies in abundance (again). I was offered another telephone call, but at this point, I had reached the end of my patience and asked for a letter to be sent. Two days later, I found a letter on our doormat. It was from a Tesco ‘dotcom manager’. There was yet more apologies, although to their credit, a promise of what will be done in the future, to avoid repeat errors. Apparently, they have employed a ‘Customer Service and Loyalty Assistant’, who will personally check all our shopping. That is great if it works, and I am more than happy to give them the benefit of the doubt. Enclosed in the letter was a “gesture of goodwill”, in the form of a gift card. There was nothing to tell me how much had been placed onto the gift card, but when I tried to use it on the latest online shop, I was told the card was invalid. I will take the card with me next time I go to an actual Tesco shop, but at the moment, this gesture of goodwill is just an empty gift card. Wow. Thanks.

As anyone who is afraid of spiders will know, this is the time of year when they all come into our homes to mate with each other and kill us all. With this in mind, I am always on my guard while at home. One evening last week, we ate tomatoes for our evening meal. Not just tomatoes – that would be stupid – there was other stuff like cheese, bread… that’s not the point. Anyway, while tidying up after eating, I was taking the leftovers to the bin, when I looked down on my hand to see a large, black spider. I screamed like a big girl and threw all the rubbish on the floor. Claire came running out of the kitchen, before bursting into a fit of laughter, to an extent where she ended up with tears rolling down her face. My wife isn’t a cruel person, which makes the fact she was laughing at my distressing spider encounter strange. Claire was laughing at me, because it wasn’t a spider on my hand at all. It was, in fact, a tomato stork. In my defence, it was very dark green, large and had lots of spider-leg type bits sticking out of it. Plus most of the lights were turned off. It did look like a spider at the time! while Claire took time to compose herself; I picked up all the rubbish I had thrown onto the floor, in my fright; before putting it in the bin.