I'm reasonably organised about keeping a calendar these days; I generally have a good idea of what I'll be doing for most of a week before I go shopping to buy food for that week. However, somewhere between the calendar and the shopping list I always seem to have a failure of organisation.

If I've arranged to cook a particular meal for a guest, I'll generally remember to buy the ingredients for that; but that's about as far as my efficiency goes, because at the same time I'll tend to forget that this also means my normal weekly cookery needs to contain one portion fewer, so I'll overcater for the rest of the week. And conversely, although I've known for some weeks that yesterday was not going to be the normal Doctor-Who-and-Chinese-takeaway gathering at the Gallery, I totally failed to anticipate in advance that this meant I had to arrange something else to eat.

I suppose that ideally, when I make my shopping list, I should look at the calendar for the coming week, and go through it day by day actually concentrating on each meal. But I can't imagine that working: I have the horrible feeling that after I'd tried it for a couple of weeks, I'd get really bored, start taking mental shortcuts, and thereby allow all the same errors to creep back in.