Was I, perhaps, being too sensitive? Had I, indeed, been sent insane by political correctness? Wandering around delirious with the subtleties of racial sensitivity while gently foaming at the mouth might be a bit much for Sainsbury’s marketing. After all, as Jonathan Meades put it: “we are all ethnic, but some of us are more ethnic than others” (which can be taken, out of context, as something entirely different to the original satirical point he was making). Indeed, Sainsbury’s may have been using the word with the old, apparently obsolete, meaning – heathen. Of course, the heathen falafel has no place in the cooler cabinets and on the shelves of good Christian food stuffs, like Heinz bible-bashing baked beans. It would be all right if there was a bit of integration, a bit of intermingling with decent British culture, maybe in a lamb shank stew with some lentils, or soaked in alcohol and arrested for hooliganism. But no, the proud falafel, in its arrogance, decides to remain discrete and globular.

Eventually, I decided that the fight against racism and prejudice would not be won by one bewildered and irritated young man holding a shopping basket, even if that shopping basket was really heavy, and went home to enjoy my heathen dinner.

Bleary eyed and befuddled I manage to half roll, half lumber out of bed and stagger towards the outside of the room in whichever direction is most convenient. Upon elegantly descending the staircase, I collide with the bathroom door at a carefully calculated angle designed to open it with minimum effort, and bounce me in the general direction of the toilet. Never bothering to lift the seat (but always checking the position of the lid) I begin to feel extremely centred and generally content whilst pissing like a racehorse. Truly, this is where my dharma begins; does a racehorse have Buddha nature?

Glaring into the bathroom mirror the inspection begins. Why is only one of my eyes bloodshot? What was I doing to the left side of my face during the night? Better not think about gruesome eye-eating death bacteria now, no time for that. No time because things have to happen; big, enormous, desperately important things. Like going downstairs, my god I have to go downstairs!

I was lying on my bed staring at the off-white ceiling when the days suddenly merged into one another. Before despair and atrophy woke up to battle once again through the theatre of my mind, I turned my head slightly to look at the clock. Unsurprisingly it was past noon; the sun was now plunging towards the horizon determined, I concluded, to rid me of my day. I made a quick calculation of how many times I must have pushed the snooze button since whatever ridiculous and ungodly hour the alarm had been optimistically set to the night before. The answer was usually somewhere in the mid-twenties.

Now came the difficult part; breaking free of the numerous sheets and quilts which enshrouded me so comfortably during the night. What I thought had been a kind and comforting friend during my time of need had now become too clingy. Surely these sheets had realised by now that if they truly loved me they should let me go. I rolled over as if to comfort and reassure them; I would be back in a matter of hours, no need to worry. Still the damned things pinned me to the mattress.

Once again that familiar feeling crept over my body. Atrophy, stilted frustration, castrated rage, the feeling that by some objective universal standard I was wasting my summer. Even my organs were bored, slumped on top of each other staring vacantly into the middle distance, occasionally bothering to process a fluid or secrete some hormone. And… once again I set to steel my resolve, for today would be the day! Today would be the day when I bloody well did something! And with a blood curdling cry invoking all the gods of getting things done and all the demons of efficient productivity I would, at some point, leap violently from my bed (no doubt tearing the fiendish sheets from me as I flew) and I would go out there and self-actualise so vigorously and so completely the universe would implode from the stress of it all.

Any time now…

So as I ventured out on that terrible Monday, walking with great trepidation and care across the barren hinterland of Islington – even the multitude of kids running around laughing and attacking each other did so with barely concealed terror – I thought of Dolph Lundgren’s roll in the John Woo film “Blackjack”. Dolph plays an insanely over powered bodyguard (his stats are so high he needs a heat sink for all the awesome etc.) who happens to suffer from chromophobia (Spell check: did you mean homophobia?). He fears colour, specifically white, yes, the colour white. I wondered how such a man, with his massive guns and grim sarcasm in the face of overwhelming odds, could possibly survive in even a temperate environment let alone the horrific arctic conditions that London is apparently afflicted with. Incidentally, the main antagonist in the film covers our hero with milk, which spurs Dolph into saying, with a look of steely determination and a jaw set to kill, the line “He poured milk on me…” as some sort of excuse for the horrific murder that’s about to take place (it may not have been that horrific or even in fact a murder; I haven’t seen the film in a while. Actually, I don’t think I’ve seen it more than once).

I finally reached the tube station and a rather urgent thought occurred to me, I was about to have an asthma attack. I hadn’t had an asthma attack for about 18 years. No doubt this was punishment for the year of excess I have enjoyed so cataclysmically. I leaned against the glass with my eyes streaming, and waited while my soul tried to escape my body through the cunning application of sputum buried deep within me being violently expelled in a pathetic wheezing splutter. The depleted Siberian uranium and ill-humoured Russian alcoholism in the snow was a possible cause. My attention then turned, upon assessing my condition as non-fatal – triaging myself – to the other tube dwellers. They gave disapproving looks as if I should take my genetic condition elsewhere (perhaps Ireland where they stand for that sort of thing. Don’t ask me why Ireland, it was suggested by a friend. It seems he has an extremely idiosyncratic problem with a non-existing Irish stereotype.) Others, however, managed a look of strangled altruism since this is, of course, England and I was, probably, somebody else’s problem (SEP).

I have personally experienced the German toilet while I was in Luxembourg. I can tell you it’s most disconcerting; there is no plop. It’s as if you’re defecating on to some sort of alter, with nothing but the soft indistinct noise of organic matter landing on cold white porcelain to punctuate the pious act. As for the American toilet, it just can’t handle my shit. Literally. The flush wasn’t powerful enough to deal with my Great British Excrement (glorious it was, stank of the empire). The American whose toilet I had just broken referred to the British flush as “intense”.

OK, I admit that I haven’t tested every toilet in America using some sort of flush strength metric (Can it handle a half-brick? Do I hear the screams of the damned at every flush pull?) and I wouldn’t presume on this evidence to make some kind of cultural commentary comparing each nation using the Zizekian Scatological Paradigm. One wrecked toilet does not a hypothesis make.