TODAY’S challenge is to work out how to get a melon home from the office.

Not a neat little cantaloupe that you could just about fit in your handbag, although it might sustain a few injuries en route, but a whopping great rugby ball of a honeydew that’s all the more indiscreet for being cheerfully yellow.

Nothing says “hey – look at me, I’m over here!” quite like the colour canary. It’s why you don’t see many yellow baboons in Sefton Park, not because of the unfamiliarly inclement climate but because the grey city animals have jealously chased them all away.

So, tonight, I have to get the bus home, and I have this attention-seeking melon to transport. There’s no space in my bag and I don’t trust it in a carrier as it would make a perfect slingshot, should I accidentally over-swing it in the queue for the bus.

The only option, I fear, is to hold it in both hands, but this method of conveyance has its own risks.

Somehow, I have got to pay the driver; a task that is tricky enough with two hands, given the black hole inside my handbag. With only my teeth to transfer the coins from my purse to his open palm, disaster is assured.

That is, of course, assuming I make it all the way to the bus stop without anything untoward occurring – no mobility vehicles joyriding down Castle Street or overturned lorry of banana skins.

I’m not hauling the melon home by choice, but out of necessity. I was sent a basket of fruit as a PR stunt by Kelloggs and, while apples and grapes can be neatly consumed without creating a torrent of juice, melons were not invented for desk dining.

I can only imagine the expression on the IT technician’s face as he shakes half a dozen melon pips and three or four yellow baboons (well, they’ve got to hide some-where) out of my no-longer functioning keyboard.

No, I would rather undergo the traumatic experience of carrying a melon on the bus than ever bear witness to that again (last time, it was half a skinny decaf latte that induced the menacing scowl).

And it isn’t as if bus travel isn’t traumatic enough anyway. I am not blaming the bus operators, nor Merseytravel, for this, as a service, is basically OK. It’s the people that are the problem.

Actually, I have to concede that it’s not so much the people that make bus travel unpleasant as my horror of them, even accidentally, invading my personal space.