Heroes

The theory goes that once you get up close and personal and discover they talk with their mouth full, or kick small animals for fun, it will make a mockery of your idolatry and you'll realise nobody's really that wonderful anyway, like the moral epilogue at the end of an American teen sitcom.

However, as far as I know, the wise man said nothing about silently watching your heroes at a distance of approximately five foot from the next picnic table along, so I'm safe from learning a life lesson of any kind (apart from perhaps that I really am as loud as people tell me I am). This is an issue I've been in sweet denial about for years. I am not too loud, everybody.

It was already shaping up to be a darned good Sunday afternoon when it happened. I thoroughly believe Sunday afternoons are an art form, by the way, more so than any other weekly time allotment '“ you have to make them good, because they can so very easily be bad.

I think my Sunday mentality is ingrained, a hangover from the days when putting down your spoon after Sunday lunch pudding was a fatal signal for the entrance of a big black cloud in the shape of your geography homework, which would hover around your youthful head until Monday morning, while the sick lump of dread in your stomach couldn't even be relieved by the soothing antidote of the Last of the Summer Wine theme tune.

So a bit of effort is still required to extinguish the cloud of dread and make Sunday afternoons the event they deserve to be. Luckily, my new home of Highgate, North London, was purpose-built for brilliant Sunday afternoons.

For one, it likes to pretend it isn't London at all, but somewhere delightfully rustic in the Cotswolds where everyone has their own family butter churn and no-one ever has to moan about the congestion charge.

All the pubs serve those lunches where everything comes in its own individual cauldron, and costs 3.55 for some peas. Sitting in the park is like intruding on the shoot for a Boden catalogue, in which everyone's organic-fed children are impossibly attractive, called things like Archie and Tallulah and Soy Bean, and look like they've never seen a Cheese String.

Anyway, it was in the fake countryside on a successful Sunday that I came face to face with my hero. Or rather, back-to-face, for such is my adoration that I recognised her hair from behind and had time to stop quivering before she turned round. There she was, calmly eating the slice of pie I had been eyeing up in the park caf moments earlier. Caitlin Moran, columnist for The Times and, more importantly, the woman who has stolen my life.

It is an odd feeling, to know that there exists a person who has lived your life before you got the chance, and done a much better job of it.

Caitlin Moran thinks the exact same things I think, the difference being that she writes them down in far better prose than I ever could and then gets paid bundles of money to put them in The Times. Scarily, her children even have the same names I wanted to give mine, sometimes leading me to think there is more to the situation than mere coincidence and instead the victim of some shoddy cloning experiment by an evil scientist, for a TV show that will be premiered in a few decades on Sky One.

Anything I do achieve in the coming years seems a bit of a wasted effort, as she's going to have done it all first and with a better vocabulary. Now I feel I have two options '“ to do a career-plan U-turn and start training as a nail technician, or to hang around North London parks on Sunday afternoons with the hope of somehow soaking up some of her magic. Maybe we'll even become friends, so I can gain her trust, befriend her family, then kill her discreetly and slip into her place without anybody noticing.

I don't hold it against her of course, for she wasn't to know she'd nicked my personal life plan, but naturally I do feel slightly bitter. Though I think perhaps that's mainly about the slice of pie. It would have been perfect Sunday afternoon pie.