2) While being fixed, the garage noticed that the tread on one of the tyres was below the legal minimum depth, so I had that replaced too, ready for the MOT next month. Well, not really. As it was illegal it needed replacing irrespective of the MOT.

3) Some people are really stupid. While I was waiting for the car to be finished a couple came in to collect their car from its MOT. The manager explained that it had only just scraped a pass as the tread on two tyres was on the minimum. It transpired from the ensuing conversation that the car had been give an advisory on these tyres last year. Now I may be missing something here, as I commented to the manager after they'd gone, but if you're given an advisory on one MOT, shouldn't you get it fixed before the next one?

4) With my receipt, I was given details of the ubiquitous online customer satisfaction survey. I can give a score between one and ten (which is probably five more stage points than is strictly necessary) and the garage gets points depending on my rating, which then ranks the garage against its peers. But here's the odd thing. They get 100 points for a nine or ten, 0 for seven or eight, and -100 for anything below. Which means that a scale of one to three would be sufficient.

5) The people who analyse those customer survey results sometimes have to add a nationality bias to the results - well, they do if the respondents come from different countries. Americans, for example, would give a 10 if everything is as they expected. British people, however, would only give an 8 or 9 in that case, reserving the 10 for when things are even better than expected.

6) There's a bloke I know (in that our paths cross from time to time; he knows who I am and I know who he is). A few weeks ago another common acquaintance told me, "I saw him last week; he's had a sex change and is now called Sarah". I thought he was pulling my leg and had seen his sister, or wife, or daughter. But last week I saw him (from a short distance) and, sure enough he was wearing a dress, had breasts and was going by the name of Sarah. This was a bit of a surprise, as he never struck me as being particularly feminine - in fact he always looked rather, if not scruffy, a bit rough round the edges. Not that being feminine is a prerequisite to being a transsexual. Of course, it could all still be conjecture. It may have been his identical twin sister. Except that you can have identical twins of opposite gender. And you never see them in the same room together.

8) I had a meeting in our test lab this week. That sounds an impressive name for a room, but it's just the office where the people who test our applications work. It's about as far removed from a laboratory as the workshop I attended on another day was from a room where mechanical or manual work is carried out. Anyway, my eye was drawn to a sentence pinned to the wall that didn't make a whole lot of sense: "After application remediation, artefacts emanated a trio of coupled applications. These were from a variety of sources and of a top notch pedigree". They explained that they had constructed it from various management speak words they'd been given. Another was something about "a cyclical process in a reiterative fashion" which sounds pretty tautological to me.

9) According to my annual water bill I am using approximately a third of the average amount of water for a household of my size. That must mean than either I am very frugal with my water use, or some households are exceedingly profligate. Or both. Irrespective of this, my monthly payments have been increased by 20% for reasons that I don't fully understand. But I think they did this last year, and then dropped them again at the six-monthly review. I suppose I could go back through my accounts to check - if I could actually be bothered to quibble over such a small amount.

10) I had a meeting one evening that finished earlier than expected, so I went to Tesco on the way home. I left my bags in the car so at the checkout I put the shopping loose back in the trolley and wheeled it to the car where I transferred it to the bags.

11) I thought that you needed to spend £50 in one transaction to qualify for the current Tesco money-off fuel vouchers. But it is an accumulation over all transactions. I had two pence off per litre which saved me a whopping 86 pence which isn't nearly as good as it sounds when written like that.

12) The annual limit for investing in an ISA increased to £15,000 on Tuesday. Apart from the obvious question of "who can afford to save £15,000" what is the point of increasing an annual limit midway through the year? Does it mean that if you've already invested the previous limit you can't add any more? So why not just set the new lint from the start of the financial year?

13) My car-share colleague said that his family had made a decision to use the petrol station in Smalltown more, on a "use it or lose it" rationale. It's not a bad idea - the town has already lost several shops and pubs, and the next nearest petrol station is seven miles away. Which possibly isn't the best argument unless all your car journeys are within the environs of Smalltown (in which case - why not walk or cycle) as most other journeys could be planned to pass a petrol station at some point.

14) We went fruit picking again - and got carried away again. I intended to get one punnet of raspberries and one of loganberries, but ended up with two of raspberries, one of loganberries and one of gooseberries (which have already gone into a crumble). Pity I didn't notice that the place had gloves to borrow for gooseberry picking. I wasn't sure whether the red on my fingers was raspberry juice or blood.

15) It's a good year for soft fruit - something to do with the wet winter and spring. I picked all of my raspberries in a few minutes, along a less-than ten foot stretch of cane.

16) We took two young helpers with us, who also enjoyed it. After a while CGF and I sat on the grass and let them finish because "this is fun work". But when I went to round them up I found another patch of berries that just had to be picked.