I've been told there are certain personal items you can order through the post which will be delivered in a discreet brown package, giving absolutely no indication of the contents.

Well, I ordered something along these lines a couple of weeks ago, thinking it would be wrapped in lots of plain brown paper to spare my blushes, but I was wrong.

It arrived last weekend and when I saw what was printed across the top, bottom and sides of the box, I was amazed the postman hadn't said: "It's for you, fatso."

Writ large were the words The Cabbage Soup Diet - Keeping You in Shape.

For pity's sake, I thought, a little anonymity wouldn't go amiss. I don't want the world to know that I have no will power and can't control what I eat, therefore forcing me to live on dried and pulverised cabbage leaves for two weeks.

After all, if someone orders a selection of erotic literature through the post (and you can, or so I've been told), he/she would be outraged if it arrived in a package brazenly labelled Dirty Books - Getting You Going.

Or what about those items euphemistically described (or so I've been told) as marital aids. Would you want a package emblazoned with the words Sex Toys - Top Teases for Consenting Adults, left on your doorstep?

Of course you wouldn't. Not that I'm suggesting you would have ordered such things in the first place . . .

Anyway, there I was at 7.30 on a Saturday morning, standing on my doorstep clutching a box of dried cabbage diet food.

"What's that?" said The Mother, from whom you can keep nothing under wraps, plain or otherwise. "Is it for me?" She's been asking that question ever since we had her post redirected from her old address to mine.

"Not unless you want to lose 10lbs in weight and £30 in cash in two weeks," I replied.

"Wasting your money again," she said and then she didn't mention the package again - until the following day.

I was on the phone when a friend I'd been expecting arrived early. The Mother, who loves talking to friends, especially mine, swooped and carried her off to the kitchen. I heard laughter, an ominous sound.

"Yes, dried cabbage, ridiculous isn't it?" I heard her saying as I put the phone down.

Oh dear, time for some urgent damage limitation.

I walked in on them just as The Mother was recounting how my hips are now so big I'd got myself wedged into a wicker chair in my aunt's conservatory.

"Ah, we were just talking about you," said The Mother. "I was saying how you were trying to lose weight - what is it, two stones this time?"

"This time?" I queried. "I was thinnish till 1998."

"You've forgotten your teens," said The Mother. "You had really fat legs then. Remember sending away for that plastic sweat suit you were supposed to wear under your clothes?

"And then you bought an exercise bike before you got married, or was it after you got divorced? You never used it, of course."

I admitted defeat: "All I wanted was to lose some weight without any fuss or bother," I told my friend later over a morale boosting jam doughnut.

"With your mother around? Fat chance," she replied.