Where did you buy your ironing board? You didn’t, did you? You were born with it. Everyone is, which is why everyone has one. I’ve seen tramps in Soho snuggled into shop doorways with nothing to their name except some string, a bin liner and an ironing board. My brother-in-law, who does not believe in possessions, stated proudly when I first met him that he owned nothing. But he was lying, of course. Like everyone, he had a wok. And an ironing board.

What’s more, nobody ever thinks: “Ooh, my ironing board is getting worn out. I must buy another.” Nor does anyone suddenly feel the need to upgrade, as they might do with a computer or a mobile phone.

This is why I wasn’t the slightest bit surprised to hear last week that Currys has seen a big fall in profits. Of course it has. It’s ironing board central. If you were to win a trolley dash in one of its branches, you’d scoot off and – after a while – you’d think: “Actually, you know what? I’ll just take the trolley.”

Every time I set foot in one of its branches, my head spins with the dreariness of it all. Indeed I came to the conclusion recently that Currys is the only shop in the world that sells absolutely nothing I want to buy. It turns out, however, that I was wrong . . .

Last month my BBC office was moved to something called a media village in White City, west London. It’s a place where people in thin spectacles gather each day to try to make a difference. Designed by Guardian readers, for Guardian readers, it’s a riot of impenetrable symbolism, concrete and sharp designer fountains, which would be arousing if you had mad hair and a degree in environmental poetry from a fair-trade, organic peace workshop in Hackney.

I don’t see it like that at all, however. In fact, after just a few minutes I began to think that Dante got everything wrong. There are not nine circles of hell. There are 10.

After just one morning in this edgy, pedestrianised, eco-friendly cuboid, I was filled with an overwhelming desire to pile up some old tyres and set them on fire, using diesel. I don’t like vandalism, but if someone were to decorate one of the buildings with a giant purple cock and balls, I’d be tempted to give him a pat on the back and a puppy dog.

Hopefully, I’ve now set the scene. Lots of women sitting around on Ozwald Boateng benches, working out how miserable their next programme can be and whether they can make all the interviewees cry on camera. And me, oiling my machine pistol . . .

Which brings me to the door of the village’s grab’n’go takeaway cafe. The place where everyone goes for lunch.

Trust me on this. Currys has definitely lost its title as Britain’s most out-of-step high-street retailer. Because I stood in this cafe for a full 10 minutes and decided that the tastiest things in there were the tables and chairs. Maybe, if you were a budgerigar, you might have been excited by some of the offerings. But even then, you wouldn’t know whether to put them in your mouth or use them as a lavatory.

Finally I asked a pretty young waitress if there was anything on the shelves that, by even the loosest dictionary definition, might qualify as food. She looked perplexed. Is there anything in here that once had a face? Or anything with chocolate on it?

Bewildered, she reached down and presented me with a plastic bowl full of lettuce. “No,” I said, “I am not a rabbit. I am a fully grown man. I am hungry and I want a kebab.”

Eventually she led me away from the cellophane trays full of weeds to a rack selling what can only be described as Trill. I mean it. They were selling seeds to human beings. How insane do you have to be to think that’ll work? And how certifiable do you have to be to think: “Mmmm. Yes. Those’ll keep me going for the afternoon.”

I would eat seeds, of course, but only if my harvest had failed and the soldiers had confiscated my goat. Why anyone would want to eat them in Britain, where we have pylons and plasma, I have no idea. So to find out I spent 50p on a small packet, opened it and made the catastrophic mistake of putting the contents in my mouth.

It turns out that these seeds are rich in magnesium, iron, phosphorus, calcium, selenium and zinc. In other words, you would get precisely the same nutritional benefit from eating a car. Taste-wise? Well, I’m no expert on these matters, but I’d say it was exactly like sucking on a box of matches.

Eager to make the nausea go away, I headed for the drinks counter – hoping for a Fanta or a Red Bull. But there is no place for these symbols of capitalist excess in a modern-day, west London media village, so I was offered a choice of elderberry juice, which is the first resort of the hippie and the druid, or something called wheatgrass.

It’s hard to encapsulate the flavour in a sentence. Fans describe it as “unusual” or “strong”, but I’d go further if only I could think of the right word. “Vile” doesn’t begin to get close. “Horrendous” is wrong, too. A cancerous lung is horrendous. Wheatgrass is way beyond that.

Combined with the phosphorus from the seeds, it felt like my mouth was hosting a bomb-makers’ convention. Acid, metal, fertiliser, plastic, hate: all of these flavours swarmed round my head until, genuinely, I thought I might have to vomit all over the waitress.

I must therefore finish with a warning. You must never put this stuff in your mouth. If you are hungry, eat your ironing board.

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