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.