My caffeine withdrawal symptoms took a turn for the worse this week.

Having already gone through the headaches, the depression and the tearfulness, the latest stage has seen me become a complete crosspatch.

Every day something has made me blow a fuse. In fact, blowing a fuse on my hairdryer was one of the first events that sent me into a paroxysm.

My hairdryer had been on the blink for the past few years, but it chose to pack up on me on a day when I was already late for work.

I had to leave the house with dripping locks that I knew would dry in mad kinks, especially since I was shaking my head with fury.

Then I had a techno trantrum when the lead to my laptop computer sprang a leak and wires began spilling out everywhere.

The only way I could get the computer to work was to wrap the wound with doublesided tape and keep adjusting the lead until the plugged-in symbol came up on my screen.

I'm already anticipating the stand-up battle I'm going to have with the computer shop, who'll undoubtedly tell me they can't sell me a separate adapter and I'll have to buy a completely new model. Grrrrrr!

My loved ones have felt the brunt of my outrage, too.

During a phone conversation with my mother, I rudely told her that I didn't really want to hear any more about Auntie June's standards of cleanliness (you can eat off her floor, you know) and that there was more to life than housework.

My husband, meanwhile, has been tiptoeing around me like a burglar.

He daren't get in my way on the stairs and has headed for the safety of his favourite music shop every time he sensed a seismic wave from my direction.

He did, bless him, try to get to the bottom of my anger at one stage. "Is something upsetting you, my sweet?" he said when he saw me swearing at the smoke alarm.

"Yes. This bloody thing is useless," I said, removing the contraption's battery. "It goes off every time we make toast.

And you know what?

Our daughter now sleeps through the noise and so do you. So what good would it be if we had a real fire."

"We know that. We'll have to get one with a different bleep," he suggested with a gentle smile. " But is there something else troubling you?"

"Yes. I'm too fat."

"No you're not," he said, with a sigh. He knows that every time I say this, it's pointless to argue further. So he went off to buy a CD.

Now, I'm not sure that caffeine withdrawal is supposed to make you want to kill every insect on God's earth or write abusive letters to the BBC to complain about the number of times they have repeated The Good Life. Maybe I'm just having one of those weeks.

My theory, based on absolutely nothing scientific, is that this unleashing of all the toxic substances in my body has also set free the hitherto suppressed toxic elements of my nature.

Once I've got them all out of my system, I can become a warm, loving Buddhist, ready to embrace all the bad things that happen and turn them into something positive.

First, though, I need to give the washing machine a piece of my mind.