The other day I found myself standing behind a startlingly attractive young man in the queue at Sainsbury's. He was one of those Bambi-eyed, Brad Pittalikes who makes women of a certain age come over all Demi Moore.

We should know better of course. Unfortunately, however, once you have clocked their boyish grin, you can't remember for the life of you what on earth it is you're supposed to know and who precisely you are supposed to know it better than. In other words, your brain turns to jelly and begins oozing unattractively out of your ears.

But we don't let a little thing like dripping brain matter stop us. If only I could afford £200,000 of plastic surgery, we think, while hypothetically considering methods of bumping off our partners (is it actually possible for someone to trip and "accidentally" garrotte themselves with their own bicycle chain?).

Then, inevitably, reality starts to bite. You realise that you can't put a hit out on your other half because he still hasn't fixed the leaking tap in the downstairs loo. And, after careful consideration, you also realise that even with £200,000 of plastic surgery you would still look more like Dudley Moore than Demi.

Reality has many and varied ways of creeping up on you and slapping you energetically round the chops. In my case, however, it didn't so much as slap me as cover me in treacle, drop a bag of turkey feathers over my head and then slap me round the chops repeatedly with a dead mackerel.

Embarrassment is my middle name. Personally, I would have preferred Emma, but you can't have everything you wish for, can you? And anyway, embarrassment suits me better as I seem to have an incredible knack for making a complete article of myself in public places.

Like supermarkets. So there I was unloading the contents of my trolley on to the conveyor belt doohickey at Sainsbury's watching intently as a young man, who was not even a twinkle when I was dancing in my tartan-edged jeans to the Bay City Rollers, paid the blushing, giggling girl on the till for his Yorkie, coke, copy of Nuts magazine and two packets of custard creams (a healthy lunch for any growing 19-year-old).

Then, completely out of the blue, he turned to me and smiled. I, of course, responded in a highly sophisticated, woman-of-the-world way by dropping my multi-pack of baked beans with a deathly thud on to what was a multi-pack of croissants, but what now looked like a multi-pack of eczema.

It was at this moment, as the young man picked up his carrier bag and headed for the exit, that I realised why I had been graced with such a beatific smile in the first place. It wasn't that I still had it. I can't even remember what "it" is if the truth be told, and I certainly wouldn't know what to do with "it" if the opportunity ever arose.

No, he had smiled at me because I had been singing the theme tune from Mopatop's Shop, the first line of which is "You want it, we got it; Mopatop has got it".

Like most parents, and other clinically insane beings, I inadvertently find myself singing children's television theme songs all the time. I sing Mopatop while I'm shopping; I sing Big Cook, Little Cook in the kitchen; and I sing 64 Zoo Lane whenever anyone mentions the word giraffe, which comes up in conversation more often than you might think.

I know I'm not alone in this because my partner recently revealed that he sings the theme tune from Pablo the Little Red Fox when he cycles to and from work and, while walking home from dropping the kids off at school the other morning, half a dozen of us mums spontaneously burst into a chorus from Hi-5.

Too much television isn't bad for our kids, it's bad for us.

Switch off CeeBeebies now before it's too late.

Updated: 10:03 Monday, March 22, 2004