Among the many joys I have had to give up since being diagnosed with heart failure is our weekly trip to Waitrose.

I'm not one for shopping, usually, but ambling down the aisles of our favourite supermarket was always a pleasurable chore.

My husband and I would make a special event of it and enjoyed chucking all sorts of exotic and tasty-looking items in our trolley.

My husband would throw in large quantities of fatty German salami while I was searching for organic chicken or he would sneak chocolate eclairs past me when I wandered off to get low-fat natural yoghurt.

Of course, we'd bicker at the checkout, especially when my husband realised we were about to spend £12 on bubble bath and I totted up the number of beer bottles in our trolley. But that was part of the fun.

Now that I am supposed to take it very easy, our supermarket expeditions have been limited. So this week, to compensate, we thought we'd try doing our shopping over the internet.

Rather annoyingly, Waitrose doesn't offer this service in our area. We were left with either Sainsbury's or Tesco.

Our friends Jake and Rafia have been doing the Tesco internet thing for months now and had assured us that the service was very good. If errors were made, it was usually because Rafia had inadvertently ordered 40 bananas instead of four.

So we logged on ... and within seconds were bickering.

"Get moving, then," said my husband as I tried to navigate my way around the site.

"Hold on - it's not that straightforward," I said. "I keep clicking on 'Go shopping' but nothing seems to be happening. It doesn't want to let me loose with a basket."

"That's reasonable," he said. "But I think it would help if you read the instructions properly and clicked on 'departments'."

So I tried 'departments' - and we were off. I was clicking on veg and fish and meat and frozen foods left, right and centre.

I was looking down the lists to find exactly what we wanted, in the right quantity, and it was all so simple.

But it was also incredibly DULL! So dull, in fact, that my husband decided to go off and do the ironing.

One of the problems, I think, is that there are no pictures to accompany products so my visual senses were doing none of the choosing.

There was also no sound. I thought a bit of piped music coming out of the speakers might enhance the experience (I tend to spend more when listening to Andy Williams) or perhaps hearing a voice over a Tannoy saying: "Mrs Jones to checkout 12."

While dithering over the breakfast cereals, I even became wistful for those moments when you bump into people you haven't seen in ages (usually for a very good reason) and you and your kids and they and their kids cause gridlock in the aisles.

At the end it was nice that I didn't have to queue at the checkout but then, I also missed those contemplative minutes when you spy someone's got pancakes and maple syrup in their trolley and you think 'Ooh, that looks nice, I'll just nip off and get some myself'.

The consequence of all this was that I did buy all the basics but there was no excitement when the shopping arrived the next evening.

"Did you get cakes?" said my husband, looking through the bags for a tempting morsel.

"Sorry, I didn't think of cakes," I said. "But we do have 15 cans of beans."