The problem began, as with so many of life's crises, in Woolies.

Much to the relief of the staff at Paddington Woolies, who were on the point of posting a reward for any employee who managed to run me down in the car park, I have now switched my custom to Woolies at Toowong. It would be reasonable, surely, to presume that those charged with running the sprawling Woolies empire would have a masterplan.

This would dictate that the toilet paper would always be on the left in aisle six, the spaghetti halfway down aisle four and the breakfast cereal at the top of aisle two, these three items being chosen not at random but as representative of the staples of life.

Well, my life, at any rate.

With this grand scheme in place, a person could walk into any Woolies in Brisbane and, within seconds, have grabbed a packet of muesli, a can of spaghetti in tomato sauce and a six-pack of soft and fluffy toilet tissue.

Alas, if such a masterplace exists, then I have yet to detect any evidence of it. Rather, I suspect that Woolies store managers meet in secret once a month to compare store layouts and ensure that no two stores ever put the same merchandise in the same place.

"What have you been doing since you moved to Toowong?" I am often asked by friends who can't bring themselves to pose the questions they really want answered such as: "Are you desperately lonely, have you taken to drinking metho from empty peanut butter jars and are you contemplating taking your own life?"

   "I've been at Woolies," I reply and they nod dumbly and walk off, shaking their heads.
   "Poor lad," they sigh. "He's obviously a lost soul."

This is partially true but it would not be so if Wooles had a masterplan. I can't find anything. I could walk around Paddington Woolies and lay my hand upon a can of spaghetti in tomato sauce and that other underrated delicacy, sardines in tomato sauce in a moment. No longer.

I go up to Toowong Woolies to buy a loaf of bread and a tube of toothpaste and I'm there for 40 minutes, wandering up and down the aisles, peering at shelves and slipping slowly into a deep despair.

Thousands of people move from one suburb to another every week, which means that there are thousands of people like me drifting up and down Woolies' aisles all over the city searching in vain for their spaghetti in tomato sauce.

It was not spaghetti, however, but glasses which led me to the store's brightly lit corridors last week.

I've never lived in a house with a swimming pool, feeling that if I did it would only encourage people to visit, and thus I was ignorant of pool etiquette, not realising that glass containers were forbidden. A reasonable precaution, I figured, as I read the rules in force at the pool area at my apartment block. Like all rules, I knew that this one applied to all the other people in the block except me.

"Still," I thought, "I suppose I should do the right thing." And as much as the thought of drinking alcohol from a plastic glass, no matter how elegantly shaped, appalled me, I decided to buy some.

Another consideration was the knowledge that in the course of my life, I had smashed in excess of 10,000 glasses. So it seemed reasonable to presume that if I continued to use glasses by the pool, I'd smash one, somebody would cut their foot on the shards and I'd be lynched by my fellow unit dwellers.

Abandoning Woolies, I transferred my custom temporarily to Coles in search of wine glasses and enjoyed immediate success. "And they're so cheap," I crowed, piling champagne and white wine glasses into my trolley and galloping to the checkout.

Within minutes of arriving home, I'd ripped the glasses from their cardboard packaging, washed them and put them in the cupboard, proudly displaying them to my girlfriend when she visited the next day.

   "They're nice," she said. "But they're not plastic. They're glass."
   "Rubbish," I huffed. "They're plastic!"
   "They're glass," she insisted.
   "They can't be, I bought a whole cupboard full of the them," I said.
   "I know," she said. "But they still glass."

When she was in the shower I tapped one on the kitchen tap to see if it would make a plastic noise or a glass noise. The sound which followed was unmistakably that of glass shattering on a chrome sink tap.

"Perhaps my beloved is right," I thought, picking up the bits. "They seem remarkably brittle for plastic."

Shortly after this revelation, Mum called to ask as to my Christmas wishes.

   "Plastic glasses," I said.
   "You hate drinking out of plastic," she said.
   "I know but I thought if I started using plastic I'd end up teetotal," I said.
   "That will never happen," said Mum.
   "I suppose you're right," I said. "And Mum, can you make them the big ones? You know how much I hate getting up and down."