This afternoon I decided to finally sort out the wigs we need for the movie. So I drove all the way to Lakeside Shopping Centre in the blazing sunshine, only to find they were out of stock. That was a waste of a journey, I thought to myself, and proceeded to drive home.

About halfway I remembered that I also wanted to purchase a sun lounger, having inexplicably mislaid my old one, so that I can lounge beneath the aforementioned sun and play with my laptop in the fresh air. Had I remembered this in the first place, of course, my journey would not have been wasted after all, but I didn’t so it was. But then I found myself passing a little retail park playing host to, among other shops, an MFI. Aha, I thought to myself, I bet they sell sun loungers. So I pulled in and had a look.

They didn’t. So it was still a wasted journey. But while I was there I decided to have a look in PC World and see if they’d got anything I fancied.

They had - home tee-shirt stencil kits! ShopDonkey has yet to take off and make us rich, and it struck me that this could be just what we needed - by doing the printing ourselves we could cut out the middle man, slash our prices, and make a fortune. I resolved to purchase the kit and experiment.

When I got home I told el10t I’d bought something that would make our fortune.

“It’s not one of those naff tee-shirt printing kits is it?” he asked prophetically.

“Er… no,” I said. “Um, as a matter of academic interest, remind me exactly what’s so naff about them.”

“They’re relatively expensive, awkward to use, and the results look about as professional as a Blue Peter Tracey Island.”

I decided to give it a go anyway, and printed a donkey onto one of the stencils. The first time I tried it my printer decided it didn’t fancy doing the red, so I told it to clean its print heads and tried again. This time it printed the red, but now it had given up on the black. I instructed it once more to clean up its act, and on the third attempt managed to print it successfully, only to realise I’d forgotten to flip the image and the stencil was back-to-front. Or rather it wasn’t, but owing to the nature of stencils, it should have been.

Undeterred I ironed the backwards donkey onto the tee-shirt provided. The result was a bit patchy in places, but not too awful, though a bit lumpy at the corners. With hindsight it was a mistake to re-iron these areas once I’d removed the backing - this action resulted in various bits of the donkey being transferred to the underside of the iron, and thence to other bits of the tee-shirt, resulting in a sort of hideous montage. I think el10t was right.

So it was a wasted journey after all.