I bought a bag for life from the Co-op on Monday – or to be more correct, a 'bag for a better life' as it said on the front – and an hour later one of its handles broke, leaving me with lop-sided shopping. But is it an omen, one asks oneself? Is it payback time for all the other bags for life I've bought and which now reside at the bottom of the larder having only been used once? Probably not, but I shall be checking my pulse for the rest of the week and if anything untoward happens I want you all to stand in the middle of Liskeard and shout: "It was the bag for life what done it!" But enough of that. Let's move on to Mother's Day, or Mothers' Day – we can never agree on where the apostrophe should go. It used to be called Mothering Sunday, which was much easier, but now the retail world has taken it over so everything is different Does anyone notice when it became such a big thing? At one time mums used to be lucky if they got a bunch of primroses or perhaps some early daffodils. And in those days they were early because spring didn't begin on January 14 then. Now Mother's Day is a big production number and woebetide any child, however old, who forgets to mark it. And not just with flowers, because people expect gifts, meals out and a big kerfuffle all round. Families find themselves juggling mothers and mothers-in-law, just as they do at Christmas. The old 'it was your turn last year so it must be mine this year', for those who live too far apart to participate in the uneasy truce of a joint mothers' day outing, where there will be a comparing of the size of the cards and the freshness of the bouquets. Even I must admit that whereas at one time I wouldn't have bothered had any one of my children forgotten the date, I might now be able to muster up a major sulk given half the chance. This year the score was two out of three. To her horror, my eldest daughter's card didn't get there on Saturday, even though she posted it on Tuesday. In fact it arrived this Tuesday. My son, who had already made sure his card, an extravagant begonia in a basket and Belgian chocolates had arrived safely, took great delight in reporting this back to her. The internet has solved all his gift problems. There was a time when he would arrive breathless at the nearest garden centre on Mother's Day morning frantically looking round for anything left with blooms on it. It says a lot for the honesty of that particular garden centre in Harrowbarrow that they always sold him something halfway decent and not just palmed him off with one of the plants they had been trying to get rid of since the autumn before. He often fell down on the card too, having to make one himself in a hurry (glitter, glue and a couple of withered pansies out of the window box but it was the thought that counted), or cycle up to the newsagent's to buy whatever they had left. Thus, and I never tire of repeating this, he once gave me a card on which was printed: 'You've been like a mother to me.' Now, with the touch of a finger on the keyboard he can come up trumps whatever the gift. My younger daughter, who I had rather meanly told not to buy me flowers, bought me three beautifully healthy herb plants. At least they were healthy then, but what a couple of days of Siberian weather has done to them I don't know. While we were on the telephone, my son was going on about the country being in the grip of consumerism and soon it would be Father's Day and he'd have to start all over again – but not with a begonia in a basket. And who invented Father's Day anyway? 'Woolworths', I told him, which isn't quite true but I'm sure the store's founders took it on board very quickly. So that I can bore him just as easily next time he rings, I looked up Father's Day and was surprised just how many countries actually celebrate it. Bad news if you are from Belgium, Italy, Liechtenstein, Portugal, Spain, Bolivia or some of Switzerland, because it was on March 19 and you've missed it. Which is a pity because you could have done a double with Mother's Day and only baked one cake. Several other countries celebrate it on June 23 and two, India and Lithuania, on the first Sunday in June. In Britain we join many others by choosing the third Sunday in June. This doesn't include Australia and New Zealand who celebrate on the first Sunday in September. Other dates include the third Sunday in September and there's even on in Taiwan on August 8 called 'baba day', and numerous others. All this means is that if dads play their cards right and don't mind travelling a bit, they can get a Father's Day gift practically every week of the year. 'Hello, I'm in Vietnam, it's July 7 and it's Parent's Day, where's my card?'

One of the things which always strikes me around this time is that there's been a quiet revolution in the flower industry. Flowers now are wonderful. The bought kind I mean. I don't remember anyone marching on Downing Street demanding flowers which don't flop, so what happened? There was a time when bouquets rarely lasted a few days, let alone the weeks they can now. And as for those dreadful bunches sold at garages, aimed at recalcitrant husbands or partners who had suddenly realised that the silence that had greeted them at breakfast had meant that some important date had been forgotten and they had to put it right with a collection of flowers which always included a single lurid pink carnation with one open flower and lots of buds which never opened, a maroon, or even worse, jaundiced yellow chrysanthemum, two sprigs of gypsophila and perhaps a branch of pittosporum – which in most circumstances is almost impossible to kill but this wasn't most circumstances. Within an hour the pathetic bunch was keeling over and if there was a rose in it somewhere its little head hung down and in a day went brown. If you got home with all the petals you were lucky. Now even supermarket flowers stay alive, the rosebuds actually open and some even have a scent. It is obviously something to do with those little packets of stuff you're supposed to add to the water which perks the flowers up. There are some days when I really wish that I could find something like that to perk me up. Come to think of it, whatever happened to Andrew's Liver Salts?

In the past few weeks about half a dozen people have told me I won't be able to smoke outside the building or anywhere in the street soon. At least a dozen have asked me what I'm going to do after July 1 now that I can't smoke anywhere but outside, and one thinks that cigarettes are going to become totally illegal. I tell the former that smoking in a public place does not include outside buildings, only enclosed places where the public go. We've not quite reached Stalinist policies, although they're probably not long in coming. I tell the middle lot that I'm going to be smoking where I smoke now, that is not in people's homes, cars, in restaurants, pubs or hotels, unless I can lean out of the window far enough, and that I'm quite used to being an outcast and only smoking on pavements, cliff tops and fields. I don't bother to reply to the latter. Let it come as a surprise when they try to make a citizen's arrest. Surprisingly most people, even non-smokers, are sympathetic and think the whole thing has gone too far.. As for what do I think of the people whose job it will be to catch smokers at it? I wish them luck – especially around 10.30pm in a dockside bar in the rough part of town when a visit from the smoking police will be about as welcome as a pork chop at a bar mitzvah. I'm probably not allowed to say that any more, come to think of it, about the pork chop, but hey, let's be daring. I don't suppose either that the smoking police will be anywhere to be seen in that situation, more likely they'll whip into the lounge bar of respectable hostelries and catch a couple of pensioners lighting up their Lambert and Butler in a hidden corner at two minutes past six. Well, I would if I were them!