Clothes shop manager Deidre Woolridge is seriously worried that she’s not anything-aholic, she has told friends recently.

Woolridge, 31, first voiced her worries to best friend Lorraine Hughes over Friday evening drinks in the local All Bar One. Hughes had just confessed to being something of a workaholic, having spent forty seven hours at her office that week.

“Not me,” fretted Woolridge, who had worked the required forty hours and had taken her full one hour allowance for lunch every day. “I mean, I’m no slacker, but it’s not that important to me.”

Woolridge then spent several minutes attempting to identify an area of her life to which she devoted more than the usual amount of time or energy, but, in her own words, “came up blank.”

She then made an excuse and left, returning to her house to study old copies of Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire to discover what she was addicted to. But despite scanning copies of both magazines dating back over two years and filling in repeated multiple choice tests, she achieved a “healthy, balanced” rating in all of them.

“I must have done twenty of these things, and I’m not ‘overdoing it’ on any of them,” she told her mother, Erica Woolridge, on the telephone later. “They don’t even suggest that I might want to ’step back and reevaluate my relationship with’ anything. Can you think of anything I might lack control over?”

Erica Woolridge admitted that she could not, in fact, think of anything, but reassured her daughter that she was a normal, average person, and that was something in this day and age.

Woolridge has successfully categorised all of her friends as chocaholics, clubaholics and dietaholics, amongst other addictions of varying seriousness.

“Even Jacqui at work is a clothesaholic,” she complained. “She only works at Monsoon for the twenty percent staff discount. I often joke that we don’t have to open the shop - she could keep the business afloat on her own!”

Woolridge’s boyfriend is not proving to be a pillar of strength during these difficult times.

“She’s a bloody piss-me-off-aholic, is what she is,” he told friends over a Chinese meal. “Somebody should invent a twelve step program for that.”