IT'S the freakin weekend it's supposed to be my time.

It's a day out I am promised but the fact is...it is never a day out.

Gone are the days when I had to carry ten Tesco bags each laden with three cola bottles home. Through the wind and rain six of us would walk sheepishly behind my mum each carrying enough groceries and shopping to feed 100 wedding guests.

And god forbid if someone was going abroad the week later otherwise Susan from the market was having the sale of the century.

The strange thing was you looked across the road and there were dozens of us...each with our mums at the helm with her long beige coat on. What was it with that coat did it come with the passport?

My sister was very good at putting all the heavy items into my bag. Things like baked bean and tomato tins. Minutes into the journey the bag would tear into my hands through my Spiderman gloves.

Once home your mum always forgot something so the eldest in the family had to run back to town to buy it. And all the shopping cost £10. And if my mum was to buy everything again I'm bet she'd still manage to get it for a tenner....unlike todays 'modern' women.

Even the lovely ladies from abroad know the difference between Harrods and Aldi.

With the invention of the car, or should I say when I learnt to drive, I thought the weekly trip to the shops would become easier. How wrong I have been. Even though most of our women can now drive they still manage to pull you along on the most boring and laborious shopping trips you can imagine.

You wander through the aisles of any supermarket and everything is the same. Now the mums have been replaced by their wives. The wives make every decision as to what to buy and arguments ensue when the men pick up sixteen packets of Wotsits.

I saw one guy who started sulking and rolling around on the floor because his missus wouldn't let him buy any strawberry ice-cream. His wife pulled him by the arm but his legs just turned to jelly.

And so to the fashion shops. Never did I see so many guys in one place wishing they were dead. 'I want to try this dress on but I hate the colour'. said one woman. What the hell does that mean?

The problem with most of our fashion shops is that they are too small. If a guy waits around for too long he doesn't have anywhere to stand. And if by chance he happens to stand near the changing rooms he gets labelled a pervert.

If you hang around for a while you'll discover the secret shops only certain people know about. You know the ones where everything is under a quid. And even if I end up a millionaire I'll end up going there...it's in the blood you see.