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It’s 7:15am. And as I do at 7:15am each morning, I’m sitting on the toilet. Next thing there’s sharp stab of pain in my left buttock which, when one is sitting on a toilet with one’s most closely guarded fleshy bits at their most vulnerable, can never be a good thing, right? A string of expletives and one superhuman leap across the bathroom later, I was ready to stare down one of mankind’s primal fears – as getting bitten on the arse while on the toilet surely is.

Except there was nothing there. No spider, no scorpion, no snake or rat. Not even a fire ant. Once I’d shuffled back across for a closer inspection, the culprit became apparent – a small crack in the toilet seat. It had nipped me. Is nothing sacred? Among the usual chaos that is the early morning at my house, I treasure those few minutes of peace and quiet in the maelstrom of getting ready for school and whatnot that goes on around me. Only now to be attacked in my own inner sanctum.

Having been the one perceived to have “broken” the toilet seat, I was naturally tasked to buy a new one. And that meant having to take the old one into Pennypinchers to make sure I got the right shape for our toilet. Now I don’t know about you, but this was a prospect I found highly embarrassing. Perhaps it’s my uptight English ancestry, but the thought of walking about in public with an obviously used toilet seat is, frankly, utterly mortifying. I could just imagine the normally relaxed customers at Pennypinchers slowly backing away as I entered their store.

“Don’t be an idiot,” said my wife, “just wrap it in a black rubbish bag. No-one will notice.”

So, yesterday, into the store I walked – “skulked” is probably a better word – the rubbish-bagged toilet seat under my arm.

I never even made it past the front reception desk…

I’d probably taken three steps inside their establishment when – without any prompting on my part – the receptionist spotted me and said in a voice just loud enough for her PA mic to catch and broadcast: “Toilets seats sir? Right to the very back of the store.”

Clearly people walking into Pennypinchers with a broken toilet seat wrapped in a black bin bag is nothing new.

And now I realise that two of my first three blogs are about ablutions. I'm not usually like this.