I have a love-hate relationship with eBay. I love buying on it, I hate selling on it. Once, I tried to sell a pair of sunglasses. I photographed them from every angle, uploaded all six pics plus a description of forensic thoroughness, only for someone to email me asking how wide the lenses were in millimetres. Selling on eBay is a vocation only for the long-term unemployed.

That is, unless you hit upon the cynical idea of going around clothes shops buying up the best stock and selling it on at hugely inflated prices. If I were a little less cross, I might be able to think of a witty acronym for the 529 sellers on eBay who are currently punting pieces from Matthew Williamson's sold-out collection for H&M. Designer/high street collaborations were supposed to democratise style, offering high fashion at high-street prices.

While Williamson's range for H&M was hardly cheap as chips, it was a darned sight less expensive than his main line, which, with its £2,000 dresses, will forever be the sole preserve of Sienna Miller. So it's a little irritating that a floor-length ruffle dress is currently listed on eBay for £399, double the price it was supposed to sell for.

Despite H&M limiting sales of each item to two per customer, it seems as though those first through the doors snapped up everything they could, with the sole intention of making a massive profit. May they be plagued with tedious questions about ruffle lengths. In millimetres.

• It's 8.40am and I'm stomping along in a huff because the gas people are digging up Avenue Road again and the traffic is murder. Out of the corner of my glowering eye, I notice a woman sitting on a bench by the Regent's Park canal.

She can't be a day under 70. Dressed in a vest and shorts, she is playing a violin while beside her rests a picnic basket and a glass half-full of champagne. Well, why not? See, this is what I love about London in the sunshine.

It makes roadworks melt away, pensioners take to their fiddles and bad moods dissipate like bubbles in a freshly poured glass of Krug.

• Some girls consider it their life's work to bag a footballer, hanging out at Movida in the hope that one day, their knock-off Gucci mini-dress will be the real thing, paid for by a Chelsea star.

But has the plaintive caw of Elen Rives, that erstwhile bird of prey who so magnificently snared Frank Lampard, caused them to stop and think? "I'm 34 and old now. What am I supposed to do? It's too late for me."

Finally, someone has shattered the shiny, brittle veneer of WAG-dom, a vocation with a shelf life so short that it makes a Premiership footballer's seem long by comparison. Don't go there, girls.

I once went to the Cotswolds on holiday. If you're well off, you buy a cottage there. If you're skint, you buy a weekend at the Lygon Arms. There, looked down upon by a large stuffed stag, you eat too much breakfast before setting off in your townie car to drive around the townie-hating villages, where you are easily identifiable as a townie on account of your dreadful townie clothes.

At some point, you will come across The Copper Kettle - there is one in every Cotswold village - where a lady in an apron will slap down a clotted cream tea, her face a mask of brittle pleasantry.

Burford has a Copper Kettle. The village has just been voted the sixth most idyllic place to live in Europe. I've just googled Burford, and without a word of a lie it also has a pub called The Lamb, a clothes shop called Belinda's and a bakery called Huffkins, run by a Mrs Topsy Tae. Well, she wouldn't be called Sanjita Patel, would she?

And herein lies my problem with the Cotswolds. As a reflection of modern Britain, Burford is about as representative as the Night Garden, with its Tombliboos, trubliphones and tiddles. Burford might be a lovely place to live if you're the sort of person who never farts but give me London any day, in all its stinking, ugly glory.

Perfect places set my teeth on edge. Not that Burford will be perfect for much longer: the coachloads of tourists will see to that. Forget motorways or Tesco: if ever there were a death knell for a pretty English village, it is to be featured in a Forbes Top Ten idyllic places.

* I'm as pleased as the next skint person that Natalie Massenet, owner of the brilliant website net-a-porter.com, has finally launched The Outnet, a virtual "outlet shop" selling past-season designer bargains. But I feel a bit cross that she has gone and trademarked the phrase "It's Chic-onomics". The first recorded usage of "chiconomics" I can find was back in August 2007 but since the credit crunch, its popularity has soared. Words, especially silly, made-up ones, should belong to everyone.

* Every era has its defining moments. 1969: man walks on the moon. 2009: Ashton Kutcher becomes the first person to attract a million followers on Twitter, beating CNN by half an hour. I'm pleased for the guy, but then, the playing field is hardly level. CNN might have, like, world news at its disposal, but Ashton Kutcher posts photos of his wife's bottom - and his wife is Demi Moore.

Anyone interested in seeing what she looks like bent over in a pair of white knickers need only go to http://twitter.com/aplusk and swell Kutcher's ego - sorry, popularity - further still. Or you could go and watch some paint dry, instead.

Ever since that Panorama investigation, I have avoided Primark. However dire my bank balance, it is still not so dire that I need clothe myself in cheap dresses wrung from a small Indian girl's tears.

I was still telling myself this one day last week, when I found myself getting off the 274 at Marble Arch and walking like an automaton into Primark. I'll just have a look, I said. It's my job, I said. How I wrinkled my nose distastefully at the clothes, which were heinous. Scratchy heart-print tea dresses in the vague style of Luella Bartley, clingy T-shirts in chavvy shades of blue and lime

Up the escalator I went - just to have a really thorough look. Did I tell you it's my job? Suddenly, there they were. A pair of sweetie pink jelly sandals for £3. Before I could say "stinking, rotten, lousy, no-good hypocrite", I was paying for them at the till, while my cashier and the cashier next to her sustained a long and very detailed conversation about the kebab one of them had dined on last night.

I'd love to say the sandals left a sour taste in my mouth but I'd be lying, because I like them too much and they were only £3 and small Indian girls can't have been involved in their assembly because they are just moulded pieces of rubber, after all, so where's the harm? Only I know very well where the harm is, and that I must never alight at that bus stop again, or even glance over the road when I am visiting Selfridges. Because that way, madness lies.

* I've just been for a wax. Possibly, there being a credit crunch and all, the salon was a little overstaffed. "We both do you? Will be quicker," assured Lady A, in treacly Turkish tones. They seemed to enter some sort of tacit competition. Lady A finished way before Lady B, which was fine, until she started peering up and down my leg with a disapproving look. Then, with a flourish of her paper strips, she started waxing my feet. Who knew? All these years, and I never realised my feet were hairy. Truly, it is a wonder any man has ever wanted me.

* Richard Ashcroft is a god. I've seen The Verve in London, New York, Glasgow, Brighton, Glastonbury and Wigan, and still have every ticket stub. After worshipping him for 12 years from afar, it was more than a little unnerving to be sitting in the same room as him, eating the same bresaola and drinking the same chilled wine. Just as I was about to pass out from excitement, I clocked his suit. It was white and stripy. In an instant, he went from deity to dodgy dresser. Which only goes to prove one thing: never meet your idols.

It didn't have the right ring about it. "Amy Winehouse, Barnet". It sounded as wrong as "Prince William, Catford".

And so it was that the genteel suburbs of Barnet, home of good state schools and not too many lock-ins, failed to hold Winehouse in thrall, and back she went to Camden.

At the risk of sounding pedantic, whatever the tabloids might claim, Amy actually went back to Chalk Farm. When it comes to the boozy antics of today's youth, Chalk Farm always seems to get misrepresented as Camden, but as a Chalk Farm resident, I feel we should be accurate. Yes, Camden was the home of Britpop (its principal drinking den, The Laurel Tree, is indisputably near Camden Town Tube), but that was 10 years ago. These days, everything centres on The Hawley Arms, a good half-mile up the road. The Hawley is that rare thing in London: a pub that is still packed, its loyal clientele so devastated when it burned down last year that they lobbied the local council to get it rebuilt again, and threw a big party once it had been.

Still, The Hawley alone doesn't explain Chalk Farm's appeal among the crazier members of London's party scene. Even caners have to eat sometimes, and this is where the Marathon Kebab House comes in. Henry Holland had his birthday party there, while Pete Doherty often pops in for a doner.

From incoherent kids to intellectuals spilling out of the Roundhouse, all human life is here. Richard Curtis will never make a film about Chalk Farm but that's precisely why I love it. Like Amy, I'd choose it over Barnet any day.

* British retailers might be languishing but the Italian superbrands are still living la dolce vita. On one stretch of Sloane Street it is as though the recession never happened. Missoni has just opened its first London store at No 193; Dolce & Gabbana is re-opening its revamped boutique at No 175, and at No 18, the new-look Gucci store was unveiled over the weekend, a 20,000 sq ft temple of glass, mirror and tone-on-tone bronze. Meanwhile, the rest of Britain's high streets turn to ghost towns. I don't suppose Gucci fancies opening a branch in Torquay?

* Here's a tip for anyone too skint to venture to the Fat Duck: get yourself to Popham Services on the A303 instead. For a mere £5.95, you too can sample the culinary skills of Heston Blumenthal thanks to his splendidly revamped Little Chef restaurant. Granted, the food on offer isn't so much molecular gastronomy as bog standard classic British but, still, we had the time of our lives. My steak pudding was divine, while any place that serves ice cream topped with popping candy deserves a medal for transporting children to such ecstasies that they barely noticed the journey back to London.

At dinner with friends the other night the usual topics loomed large like spectres at a feast. “When this is all over, the British high street will be unrecognisable. Unrecognisable!” boomed one. We chided him for being so melodramatic. But was he?

It all looked so different 12 months ago. When Jane Shepherdson bought a 20 per cent share in Whistles, the first question on everyone's lips was: “When can I buy some?” Credit crunch? What credit crunch? I remember being whisked off in a black Mercedes for a private view. The clothes were fabulous: designer quality at high street prices. The new-look Whistles deserved to succeed. And, hopefully, it still will.

When the recession first nibbled on our wallets, I was of the opinion that a cull might be for the good, purging the high street of lazy, flaccid retailers who think nothing of charging £20 for a cardie that bobbles in the wash. When sportswear chain USC went into administration in November it felt like no great loss — ditto Barratts (hadn't set foot in one since 1986), Ethel Austen (never been in it) and Morgan (been in it and walked straight out again).

But when Bauger went into administration on Friday, I revised my view. Baugur owns stakes in House of Fraser, is Whistles' lead shareholder and has interests in Oasis, Karen Millen, Warehouse, Principles and Coast. Things are getting scary. Far from ridding our high street of the chaff, it looks as though the wheat is being carried off in the wind as well. And the queue down the dole office will never have looked so stylish.

As someone who insists on unsalted butter, unsalted veg and unsalted crisps, I feel gloriously vindicated by recent headlines on the evils of sodium. Forget pastry and pasta: salt bloat blights the waistline far more grotesquely than any number of carbs.

Rather than embrace the latest fad diet, a quicker (and healthier) result can be achieved by ditching the salt. Food tastes kind of bland for a while, but you soon get used to it. Plus it's a small price to pay for a healthier heart, loose jeans, unpuffy ankles and eyes that don't look as though they belong to ET.

Jade Jagger got married and announced it on Facebook. How very modern. I am extremely jealous of Jade, though not for the reasons you might think. For while her chestnut mane, brilliant smile and impeccable rock star lineage are enviable things indeed, what really turns me puce is her middle name.

Since I was seven I have wanted to be known as Jezebel, purely on the basis that I love its timbre. When my mother refused, I swore I'd name my first-born thus instead. “You can't call your daughter after a prostitute from the Bible!” my mother screamed. Heck, mum. It doesn't seem to have done Jade any harm.

I HATE the January sales but this year they are more heinous than ever. I suppose it stands to reason: shops have been on sale for so long that only the truly gruesome tat is left - tat that even a Celebrity Big Brother contestant might reject as too minging.

But even the dimmest chains have now cottoned on to the fact that, in today's era of fast fashion, women expect to see new stuff even as the old stuff lingers around like a bad smell. And so we have the curious spectacle of H&M, windows ablaze with shiny new spring clothes in cream and pastel pink, while the shop floor is still an Armageddon of black lace.

Sweeping a cold, analytical eye over the rails, I can't help but hope that the current sale-to-end-all-sales acts as a wake-up call to retailers. The rows of unloved sequined party dresses, as jarring as Christmas trees in July, state the obvious far more starkly than any trading figures could ever hope to: that customer needs are not being met.

Anticipating the downturn, and in a bid to protect their margins, most high street retailers started using cheaper fabrics and lousier finishes many months ago - the results of which are now languishing on the sale rail.

Whatever the retailers hoped, women aren't buying things made from nasty acrylic with threads dangling off. The recession's most surprising revelation thus far seems to be that cheap doesn't always equal cheerful. Up to 75 per cent off? Darling, I wouldn't wear it if it was free.

* Shhh ... can you hear that? It's the sound of a pigeon winging its way to Hemel Hempstead to deliver my Ocado order. Lord knows it would be quicker than my internet connection, which has reached new lows this month. Am I alone in being virtually unable to use the internet on a Sunday evening, or do I just have the misfortune of being a BT customer?

Apparently, it's all because I live "too far from an exchange". Here's an idea: start making public the location of these mysterious "exchanges" and it might cure the property slump overnight. Londoners part with fortunes to be near a good school: imagine what they'd pay to have faster broadband.

* Rachida Dati: stone-hearted career bitch or pioneer for "have it all" women everywhere? However much her chic back-to-work outfit might suggest otherwise, I honestly don't think it's possible to be anything other than strung-out five days after a Caesarean, unless they have invented radically different drugs since I had mine. Dati might be back behind her desk but I'd seriously question whether she's of much use there. Clearly, she has made this Herculean effort for one reason only: to get some "me" time.

Never mind the weeping stitches: compared to the exhaustion of caring for a newborn, any day job is a cinch.

I realise I ought to have spent Saturday afternoon buying presents. But that would have implied a calm and rational mind. Mine was not a calm and rational mind. Mine was the mind of someone who had been holed up in bed with flu. I didn't want Christmas shopping - I wanted fun.

There's fun, and there's family-friendly fun. And since getting sozzled on mulled wine wasn't an option, we went ice-skating instead. No matter that my husband is phobic (as in he can barely extract an ice cube from the freezer) and my daughter is two: the nice people at Somerset House had assured us that Sergeant-like levels of ability wouldn't matter, because they'd give us an Ice Guide.

Everybody needs an Ice Guide. I wanted to take mine home with me. Nathaniel was a teacher in his other life, and very good with kids. With the help of a large plastic penguin (for balance), mine was soon skating like Jayne Torvill to his Dean. The pagophobic, meanwhile, even managed to let go of the barrier a couple of times without falling. As darkness came down and the lights conjured enchantment from the Corinthian splendour of Somerset House, it felt wonderful to be alive and in London at Christmas time. Then I fell over. Ouch.

With so many inevitable wrangles over Christmas lights this year (my local high street very nearly didn't have any), it's all too tempting to dismiss London as a curmudgeon who enters into Christmas half-cocked. A visit to any of the 10 rinks that have popped up all over the city should dispel this notion, and I'd urge one on any family feeling stressed, miserable or bored. Like the finest gin and tonic, London is best served on ice.

* A question for London's ailing restaurateurs: what's going on with your portions? After dining at one fashionable Mayfair establishment last week, I had to go home and make a sandwich. My starter (£12.50) was small enough but my main (£17.50), a meagre duck leg that didn't so much nestle on a bed of spinach as balance on five leaves, was night-time robbery. "It looks like a mouse's picnic," one of my companions remarked of the cheeseboard, which featured four slivers so minuscule that even a rodent would have wrinkled his nose in dismay. Downsizing portions is no way to woo custom in a credit crunch: it's cynical, mean, and surely bad for business.

* Sixteen weeks, 1001 tears and eight million votes later, north Londoner Alexandra Burke (below) has won the X Factor. If you can overlook her banging on about "my dream come true", she is a worthy winner. What a shame she has been eclipsed by the most potentially disastrous relationship in reality TV history, aka Diana and Eoghan. However valiantly Alexandra belts out her new single, the public can't fail to be distracted by the two teenaged runners-up. Their snogging was the real star of the show. Upstaged by a Furby: who said life was fair?

God knows, we all need a bit of escapism. But when you're too poor for holidays and too old to stuff your nostrils full of powder, escapism can be pretty hard to come by. I used to watch films. I rented them from Amazon, until its DVD arm got swallowed up by lovefilm.com, the most useless business in the Western hemisphere. Lovefilm.com dispatches items from your rental list completely at random, so that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre turns up when your aged mother is staying.

"Ah, but why not download films from the internet?" I hear you cry. Simple: it takes about five days.

Faced with the apparent impossibility of being able to watch a film in the comfort of our own home, we had no other choice but to leave said home (the terror!) and go to the cinema. I have a miserly attitude towards the cinema. When it comes to tipping beer down my throat, I am perfectly happy to pay our nanny to babysit while we go to the pub.

Not so for the movies. It's all about the ratio of cost to laughter. However hilarious the cinematic experience, it can never be as funny as four pints. That is, unless you visit the Odeon Swiss Cottage.

My husband's taste running more to Waltz with Bashir and mine to High School Musical 3, we can never agree on which film to see and spend our lives watching dreary MOR compromises. So off we went to see the latest Bond film. After wading through a carpet of popcorn so deep that Camden's entire rodent population would have had trouble demolishing it, we were confronted with a series of A4 notices. The first informed us that one screening was cancelled. The second said the heating was broken in Cinema 4. And the third said that three more screenings would be out of focus. "If you find the feature at all difficult to watch, please leave WITHIN THE FIRST 30 MINUTES and we will refund your tickets in full," said the notice. And they wonder why everyone is staying in.

Our nanny already ensconced in the house, we figured we might as well proceed with our rare night out. Save for a bloke in a bow tie (why bother? Your cinema's rubbish!) standing up to apologise for "tonight's performance" starting 15 minutes late, the evening passed without further incident. Granted, my husband couldn't quite see Gemma Arterton with all the clarity he might have wished, but, on the bright side, at least the blurry quality of the film made the relentless product placement seem less stark.

With less money to spend on going out, you really want your night to be a bit less rubbish when you do. Yet too many businesses have become so complacent that they don't deserve your hard-earned cash. If the recession sounds their death knell, I won't lament their passing.

Back in the mists of 2007BC (Before Crunch), the issue of who had been voted off Strictly/The X Factor was hardly one of national importance. But now that everyone (even the everyones who live in Chelsea and went to Oxbridge and used to go to the opera) stays in on Saturday night, all people seem to talk about is John Sergeant.

Not me, I hasten to add. Oh no: I'm too busy talking about Laura White. White, a lantern-jawed, Winehouse-haired Northerner with a voice vaguely evoking Bonnie Tyler's, provoked outcry by being voted off The X Factor, despite many viewers thinking she was the next Celine Dion. Rather than put the episode out of their minds and switch over to watch Match of the Day, 50,000 people signed a petition urging Ofcom to investigate whether the voting was rigged. Of course the voting wasn't rigged. What troubles me is that there are 50,000 people in the country still living under the illusion that TV talent shows are actually about finding talent. Like, duh!

Over in our house it's X Factor all the way (my poor husband reads Euripides during the really boring parts), ergo I've only watched Strictly once. But it was enough to twig that John Sergeant is to dancing what Jordan is to style, with a technique that could best be described as "cutlery falling out of a drawer".

Does it matter? Not a bit. What Sergeant's enduring popularity indicates is that we are all getting sick of that cabal of contestants who use the show to resuscitate their stalled careers. We don't want talent: we want entertainment, and it is far funnier to watch cutlery falling out of a drawer than the toned, tanned, try-hard determination of some erstwhile model. Strictly's judges might like to think they are presiding over a serious talent contest but the programme is far more in the tradition of those rubbish Saturday night Seventies entertainment shows. Like a warm hug on a cold night, it's silly, wholesome and fun for all the family.

By contrast, The X Factor is an exercise in catharsis. Chez Craik, Saturday nights are spent releasing all the pent-up frustrations of the week in a pastime best described as Ranting At The Telly. We rant at Dannii's eye make-up. We rant at Louis' song choice. And we rant at Cheryl's pathetic attempts to do sympathy (my husband is possibly the only man in Britain who doesn't even like her, much less fancy her. Although, hmm, maybe he doth protest too much). When I'm not ranting at the telly, I'm text-ranting to my friends, all of whom are bellowing at their tellies, too.

I blame the credit crunch. If we had more money, we might be able to buy ourselves a life. Then again, why bother? Our current one is so much fun - and free. Diana to win!

THIS morning, I woke up feeling thirsty and went to fetch a drink of water. But wait. Should it be from the bottle, full of CFCs leached from its plastic container? Or should it be from the tap, recycled after use by seven million Londoners? Decisions, decisions. Every health claim has a counter-claim and every day a new warning to heed as we navigate the tightrope of our nannied existence.

It used to be that, if you had so much as a sip of alcohol when pregnant, you would give birth to a two-headed baby. Not any more. Quite the opposite, in fact. According to the latest study last week (can it really be more than five minutes since the last one?) a couple of weekly glasses of Sancerre (provided they don't have deadly levels of metal) will ensure your baby is brighter and better-behaved than your abstinent neighbour's, and thus more likely to get a scholarship to that lovely north London school with the navy blazer.

Quite what the point is of a study whose only consequence will surely be to make abstinent women furious and booze-lovers more likely to get plastered, I'm not quite sure. But I do know there isn't a mother in London who wouldn't prefer to see a well-funded maternity service than another survey telling her what she should and shouldn't do when she is pregnant. Talk about chucking money down the wrong drain.

We are ruled by a government that never seems to pass up the opportunity to interfere, yet the more it interferes, the more confused we all seem to become. What nobody in office has realised is that, however many health surveys you present them with, and however persuasive the results, people will always massage the evidence to suit their own lifestyles. "At least I'm getting some fresh air," I heard one smoker say to another yesterday as he tugged on a Marlboro Light. Was he joking? Who knows? Even as we speak, somebody is probably authoring a survey to prove that smoking on the pavement is less likely to cause cancer than smoking indoors, provided you stand on one leg and sing Jingle Bells while you do it.

Still, our penchant for massaging the truth is nothing compared to that of the food giants, many of whom should truly burn in hell for the bollocks they try to spin us. On holiday the other week, I actually sat through a TV ad in which the makers of Nutella (ingredients: sugar, vegetable oil, cocoa) assured me it was a healthy start to a child's day, on the basis that it "released energy slowly". And I've lost count of the number of foods I've spotted in the supermarket, stamped with the Government's traffic-light system, that have more greens than reds on their packaging, even though they are virtual heart attacks in a packet. Health warnings should carry a health warning.