IF you are at home during the day, salespeople assume you are a complete moron.

This might seem a little extreme, but it is the only feasible explanation I can come up with for their behaviour whenever I open my door to them at 11 o'clock on a Wednesday morning. Either that or I am in fact a complete moron and everyone else is just too polite to mention it.

Whatever they are selling, whether it is gas, God or a set of 42 encyclopaedias in delightful leatherette, wipe clean bindings, they all greet me with the same patronising expression on their faces. It's difficult to describe, but you know it when you see it. Just imagine Terry Wogan talking down to an impossibly cute disabled child with a lap full of Andrex puppies on Children In Need night and you won't be too far off the mark.

"Morning madam," they say, while inanely grinning like Tony Blair at a "whose got the most inane grin" contest. "Nothing to worry about."

Now, I don't know about you, but opening the door is not one of the most worrisome tasks of the day for me. I don't usually lose sleep over the thought of someone ringing my bell and not running away. It's a pretty simple procedure (even for someone with the IQ of a sponge like myself): the bell rings, I spend five minutes rummaging around for my keys and swearing a lot, then I open the door. No worries.

The thing that most salespeople don't seem to have realised yet is that as soon as they say "nothing to worry about", we housebound morons immediately know they are going to try to sell us something we don't need at a price we can't afford. They might as well just shout "hen's teeth, £250 per dozen" through the letterbox and walk away because it would have precisely the same effect.

When I hear the words "nothing to worry about" my whole body clenches. My toes grip the step like bulldog clips and my buttocks feel as if they have been superglued together (don't try this at home).

It's not because I am suddenly worried that they are going to persuade me to part with my hard-earned cash using their wily salesperson ways - hell will freeze over and be used as a skating rink before I will ever willingly hand over my bank details to a complete stranger wearing Hush Puppies and a novelty tie - it's just that I know I am going to have to tell them to get lost, or more colourful words to that effect, in the near future.

Now this is something I do worry about. I hate being rude to people, even those who plonk themselves on my doorstep at 11am on a Wednesday without an invite but with the firm assumption that I am a moron.

I'm not the sort of person who can brusquely say "not today thank you" and slam the door firmly in their face. Instead, I listen to their monotonous spiel with benign politeness. I even nod in the right places, while all the time gamely fighting a strong natural impulse to grab one of the baby's more potent nappies and shove it in the salesperson's relentlessly flapping face.

I am not, however, above telling the odd white lie. I have told gas salesmen that I am going through a divorce and will be moving soon; many a double glazing seller believes I don't actually own my home but am merely renting from a landlord who lives overseas; and at least two Jehovah's witnesses might possibly be under the impression that I am a Satanist.

Nothing to worry about though. It's better than a niffy nappy up the nose.

Updated: 09:34 Monday, February 09, 2004