Humanity is divided on many fronts. In the face of all of our differences, if there’s one thing that unifies us, I believe it is that everyone, at some point, has asked themselves the question: if my life was a movie, who would play me?

I don’t think anyone is bold enough to go for a Pitt or a Jolie. If you’re a bit of a knob end you might pick someone like Audrey Tautou. At a push you might shrug and say, ‘maybe Jesse Eisenberg.’

The reason I bring this up is because, on more than one occasion, out of the mouths of different people, I have had the following words hurled in my direction:

“Kate, you’re so Hugh Grant.”

This is problematic on two fronts:

1) Hugh Grant isn’t an adjective.

2) Hugh Grant looks like an underwhelming toffee pudding that’s melted under the weight of its own sense of inadequacy.

To be ‘Hugh Grant’, from what I can gather, is to be painfully awkward. It’s synonymous with ‘wet blanket’, and best expressed in a withering utterance of ‘bugger’. The worst part of all of this is I’m starting to think such a character profile of myself might be woefully accurate.

“The cashier was reaching for the little red button underneath the till that has the police on speed dial”

Hugh Granting (now using it as a verb, keep up), is something I do daily, regretting most of the things I say and do to anyone I find attractive/intelligent/funny/intimidating/breathing. If I had a penny for every time I said the word ‘sorry’ in a day, I’d probably be able to hold the biggest and most hard-core game of tiddlywinks the world has ever seen. Or buy a lifetime’s supply of pick ’n‘ mix.

Hugh Granting best expresses itself in high pressure situations. Such as this afternoon, when I went to buy bread from the Co-Op. I was doing really well to function as a normal human being; I placed my Hovis down at the till, and then everything went categorically tits up. The cashier said something, and I completely misheard it as:

“Can I see some ID?”

“Why?” I asked, surprised, as you would be, if someone asked you to see proof of identification for something that, at most, would make a mediocre sandwich and definitely not a groovy trip.

The cashier looked at me. “That’s 98p,” he said.

“Oh! That makes a lot more sense!”

I could have left it at that. I could have given him the due sum of 98 of your English pennies. Yet my inner Hugh Grant was rising to the surface. I was going red. I was getting flustered. It was out of my hands.

“Imagine asking for ID to buy Hovis!” A queue was forming behind me, but I’m of the John Humphrys Mastermind mentality: I’ve started so I’ll finish.

“What did you think I was going to do?” I asked, really hitting my stride. “I’m going to go and snort this bread now!” I went on, a phrase which makes you sound very much like the kind of person who totally was going to go and snort the bread.

There was a silence. The cashier was reaching for the little red button underneath the till that has the police on speed dial. (I don’t know if these exist, but they seem to in Batman, and lots of other things in Batman are real. Like cars. And posh wankers in silly outfits.) I thought how this scene might play out:

‘999! It’s the Co-Op. There’s a lunatic bread addict here and I’m scared she’ll shank me if she doesn’t get her fix. Send Batman ASAP.’

Big Mouth: Anyone can do what I do

Though I’m confident I could take Batman, I felt I’d overstayed my welcome.

The moral I’m going to very tenuously procure out of this self-indulgent narrative is that nobody actually cares if you embarrass yourself. That cashier probably forgot about me two minutes after I left the shop. And while low-level bread-based humiliation might not compare to, say, forgetting your lines on stage, or being rejected on a date, or telling everyone that the Titanic looks like a super safe boat, you shouldn’t let your inner Hugh Grant stop you from taking a shot.

The only person Hugh Grant should be able to prevent from doing things is Hugh Grant.  Then perhaps Marc Lawrence’s 2014 film The Rewrite might not have happened