Yes and speaking of writing books (yes we were, yesterday) and Adonis and one thing and another – we are writing a book, as a matter of fact. We’re doing a much-expanded version of the Fashionable Dictionary. It’s going to be very, very, very funny. Eye-closingly funny, lung-emptyingly funny, furniture-breakingly funny. In fact, to tell you the unvarnished truth and not to put too fine a point on it, it already is. I say this with all due modesty and humility, on account of how I don’t have any. Don’t know what the words mean. (Better bung them in the dictionary then.) Anyway I can pretend I’m talking exclusively about my colleague’s work when I boast. But I’m not. His stuff makes me whinny and shriek like a demented horse, yes, but so does some of mine. How I long to show you some of today’s work…but alas, alas, I cannot. You will just have to wait. It won’t be long – the book will be out in the autumn. And then you can whinny and shriek too, and then you’ll rush off to buy armloads of the book to give all your friends, and I’ll be able to postpone the evil day of having to get an actual Job for another month or two, and so will Adonis.

Actually we’re writing two books. We thought one wasn’t enough, that one is kind of a pale, timid, half-hearted thing to do, that the really butch decisive assertive approach would be to write two. So we are. I’m also raising a litter of feral polecats while my colleague is building an SUV from a kit. No, that’s not true, I just felt like saying it. But all the rest of it is true.