It's a sincere form of flattery

Being that my dalliances with O2 are mercifully brief and I rarely eat anywhere with cutlery, let alone waiters, my attention is focused on the third point.

For, as much as I usually subscribe to Mr Bryson's philosophy (fill a page with witter and get paid for it), this weekend going home again was exactly what I managed to do. Just about.

Friday, around 11:30am. From our respective urban dwellings in central London and Birmingham, Joey and I set out on a majestic voyage back to everybody's favourite coastal town for the first time since starting uni.

Trusty knapsacks over our shoulders, compass pointing South, we plan to put our delicate noses into the air and follow the salty scent of seaweed and chip shops until it leads us back to our families, waiting on the doorstep with open arms, freshly-baked pies and the promise that they've cried every night in our absence.

As with most things we undertake, the reality is ever so slightly less romantic than the idea.

Manoeuvring a suitcase (of embarrassing volume for a two-day trip, I might add, being that seven weeks' worth of dirty washing seems to have "accidentally" found its way inside upon realising this might be its only chance of an encounter with detergent before Christmas) through the festival of fun that is London transport doesn't conjure up the allure of chic traveller in quite the way I thought it would.

What it does conjure up is a bruised toe, an irate pensioner (who owned the toe) and a headache.

Friday, around 12:30pm. "I didn't realise Victoria had so many coach stations" says Joey. "It doesn't" I reply through gritted teeth down the phone.

"It has one. You're just not in it".

She is, actually, as it turns out, while I am forced to admit that while the section of pavement I've been sitting on for the past half hour does look fairly coach station-ish, it doesn't look quite as coach station-ish as the large building with Victoria Coach Station emblazoned across the entrance.

Joey's intellectual victory is short-lived, however, as she admits that seeing countryside for the first time in two months was so startling she pointed at a field of cows and exclaimed "oh look! Horses!"

In fact, the whole business of leaving London is both unnerving and amazing, like Dorothy stepping out into Munchkinland for the first time and seeing everything in garish Technicolor (writing this now, I'm realising I missed a prime opportunity to use the immortal line "Oh, Toto, I don't think we're in Camden anymore").

Delightful as the Sussex autumn is, however, most joy is reserved for squealing over the new Tesco Express at the top of St Lawrence Avenue. You can take the girl out of the city'¦but you can't stop the girl getting excited over late-night groceries.

Friday, about 3pm. All hopes of a tearful, Waltons-esque family welcome are quashed when I return home to an eerily tidy house (which would oddly indicate myself as main mess-creator'¦wrong, surely?), empty except for number one brother, whose standard grunted greeting is all I can hope for in the way of sentimentality.

When Mother returns, to her credit, she does greet me with open arms, in which the seven weeks' worth of dirty washing is promptly placed.

Domestic novelty, such as re-acquainting one's bottom with the concept of sofa and finger with remote control, is fairly quick to wear off.

Not so is the novelty of being a foreigner in your own town, where I delight in being one of those hideously annoying Londoners who marches around declaring everything "quaint" and shrieking "yar, I'm just so used to being able to buy sushi at 1am'¦I can't understand why they don't do that here".

Chatting to the lovely lady at the Benefit counter in Boots, she eyes me up and down (vintage minidress, woolly beret, shamefully decrepit boots) and knowingly says, "you're not from Worthing, are you?".

To which I honestly don't know what to reply.

Until, that is, Friday at about 12:15am, when in despair at all pubs and bars being closed by midnight, Joey and I end up in a bus shelter on the seafront, eating chips. It is cold. It is raining.

But I am happy, because while Bill Bryson may well be right about the waiters and the phone company, he is most definitely wrong about the last point.

You CAN go home again '” just don't expect round-the-clock sushi. And remember which ones are horses and which ones are cows.