MADE it! At last I’m going to the supermarket. I’m so excited. Today’s the day I’ll buy loo rolls, coffee, butter, yoghurt, out of season veg, crispy salads and other treats. Other people give up drinking for January. I give up shopping.

Since I last staggered round Sainsburys on December 22 with a trolley the size of a small bus, in the last six-and-a-half weeks all I’ve bought is fresh fruit. You have to have fruit. No point saving money if you end up with scurvy.

Otherwise we’ve lived from the freezer, the store cupboard and the sack of spuds in the garage. True, we were well stocked up before Christmas. But many people are. Last month research showed that three-quarters of homes have at least £50 worth of food in the freezer – and much of it has been there so long, it just gets thrown out unused. What a waste.

Well, I’ve explored the murky depths beyond the scattered peas, solitary fish fingers and lidless ice cream tubs and made a month’s worth of edible – if sometimes slightly strange – meals. Not quite Tutankhamen’s tomb but there were all sorts of treasures down there that I’d forgotten about. As well as money, I saved a lot of time by not shopping, as well as arguments over parking spaces and unexpected items in the baggage area.

I didn’t have to think what to make for meals. It was just a question of digging something out of the freezer and wondering what I could do with it. Much less effort. To be honest, we could have easily gone for another week or so. We’ve still got plenty of lentils and dried beans and tinned tomatoes. But enough is enough. We’re not that worthy.

We’ve begun to run out of a lot of things. The loo rolls were definitely the clincher. But the freezer is empty enough to be defrosted and the cupboards are almost bare.

So now I can start filling them all up again – ready for next January.

YOU might have heard the howls last Wednesday. Not to mention the curses. And sobs. Our computer got hacked. An email from a friend’s address on a familiar topic turned out to be a particularly vicious virus that chomped through 5,000 files, corrupting them AND encrypting them for good measure.

And because our back-up was plugged in, dutifully backing-up, it chomped through that as well. Then we received a ransom note in broken English demanding we paid in Bitcoins. Arrgghhh…..

When we realised what had happened, the computer squatted on the desk like a particularly poisonous toad. We hardly dared even touch it. So many thanks to William Leafe of Aardvark in Darlington who, recognising journalists’ cries of agony and despair, took it in, cleaned it up and got it back to us on the same day. Brilliant.

We were lucky. He thinks in time – when the good guys triumph over the evil geniuses – he might even get our files back. If the evil ones put all their massive brains to good use, we’d probably have world peace by a week Tuesday. In the meantime, if I ignore your email, forgive me. I’m now ultra cautious.

I’ve also started backing everything up to the cloud. You might like to think about that too.

BROOKLYN Beckham, 16, was the official photographer on the Burberry fragrance launch – which really annoyed professional photographers who asked what qualifications the teenager had. Easy. Famous parents and six million Instagram followers. And so a lot of cheap publicity for Burberry.

And, apparently, the pictures weren’t bad at all.

SEMI-DETACHED houses are making a come back. Apparently we applied to build more last year than in the previous 20.

I just hope they’re sound-proofed better than our first house, a 1970s semi in Northallerton. The walls were so thin we could listen out for each other’s babies without leaving home. And our neighbours once gave us a can of oil as the squeak of our wardrobe door was driving them mad.

But I’m sure standards are better now…

EASYJET founder Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou has opened a new shop – an EasyFoodstore, where, for this month at least, everything costs 25p.

Tins of beans, pizzas, bags of rice, flour, potatoes, bread, biscuits, all 25p. No wonder the shelves were cleared in a trice and they had to close early. Stelios says he’s done it because he’s worried about the growing need for food banks. But he’s probably enjoying putting a cut-price cat among the pigeons. Because if Aldi and Lidl re-wrote the way big supermarkets worked, easyFoodstore might just do the same at the other end of the market.

In any case, it must show that in one way or another, we’re probably paying a lot more for food than we should.

GWYNETH Paltrow and her ex Chris Martin who “consciously uncoupled” some time ago are the best of friends, she said this week. So much so that they often stay at each other’s houses to spend more time with their children together. In fact, she says, “he’s like a brother.”

Well that’s a killer, isn’t it? After all, “I think of you as a brother” is just another way of saying “I don’t fancy you a single little bit.” Ouch.

GRAPES help you lose weight a according to research last week. Then this week more experts told us that people who get up early in the morning are also more likely to be slim. Look, I eat lots of grapes and am up at the crack of dawn to go swimming every day. So from my very definitely un-slim perspective, let me tell you that those experts know NOTHING.