Returning from swimming this sunny Sunday morning with breakfast on my mind, I pedal along the path towards the new cycle bridge (for this is Cambridge). Turning down to pass Tesco, I am stopped in my tracks by the sight of a long line of bike racks, bustling with newly arriving lock-wielding users of every age, shape and size (for this is opening time).

An upsurge of communal feeling makes me join them. What’s not to like, one might well feel (if one keeps one’s back to the massive sprawl of asphalt carpark), in this orderly bike-and-family-friendly planned urban scene? And through the doors we go, welcomed by appetising smells from the strategically sited in-store bakery.

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. Pre-wrapped enticements to obesity gang up to sabotage the last vestige of New Year’s healthy eating aspirations. Neighbouring aisles flaunt the cut-price output of every electronic, textile and cookware manufacturing sweatshop in China. It takes iron resolve and single-minded focus – not easy qualities to muster on a sunny Sunday morning – to make it through to the ten-items-or-less till with its uncorrected grammar (though this is Cambridge). But I manage to leave the store with nothing I neither need nor want, and even a relatively modest score on the food miles front (apart from some half-price Chilean cherries, a favourite fruit which our farmers' market just never seems to stock at this time of year).

My sleeping partner seems curiously unmoved by my tales of heroic self-restraint in the temple of Mammon. She has passed on this morning’s swim, having only returned a few hours ago from her day-late women-only Burns-night revelling (for this is indeed Cambridge). But the cherries go down just fine.