One of our clients is so excited by the news that Oxfam is to sell more food products that they asked me to do a series of store visits as research. Puh-leese. I dispatched Anastasia (Nervosa) who came back to the office in a tank top even more unpleasant than the one she went out in.

Worse than the stock, though, is the smell. I think it may be reverse marketing. A shop that is as whiffy as this must have some bargains in it, otherwise why would anyone go in? Anyhow, we’re able to report that our client’s brand would be right at home. Cereal (which old people like), more or less unchanged since the 1970s (along with everything else in store) and while you and I wouldn’t eat one of them, let alone three, apparently some people still do.

It may be this excursion among the undead that prompted my dream about vampires. Rather than Robert Pattinson (which I would have enjoyed) I tossed and turned to a vision of Philip Clarke growing fangs and sucking the blood out of the high street. Oddly, the high street looked a bit like Mary Portas at one point (largely vacant, but alright from a distance).

Meanwhile, bands of meat thieves are roaming the land smuggling packs of Richmond sausages out of supermarkets in specially adapted overcoats. This is an exciting endorsement of the power of marketing if ever there was one (the new TV ad features Irishmen ‘going home’ - coincidentally something Daddy talks about quite often).

Stealing a Richmond sausage when meat is pricey is, with its heady 41% meat content, like nicking a bike when petrol prices go up. Incidentally, did anyone else hear the words pot, kettle and black when Jamie Oliver mentioned fat kids?