It’s been a weekend of firsts. Friday morning was the first time I’ve purchased car breakdown cover. Friday afternoon was the first time I’ve driven a car without a large red “L” plate stuck to the back. Suddenly I have no excuse for being a bit rubbish at giving way to the right at roundabouts; I’m subjected to the intense scrutiny and horn-parping that all drivers have to put up with. Friday afternoon was also the first time I’ve driven on a motorway; I think the A1(M) counts as a motorway, doesn’t it, even though the M is in parentheses? They’re trying to say that it’s the A1, essentially, but at the same time it has all the attributes of the average British motorway – blue signs, 3 lanes, 70mph speed limit, youths hurling objects off bridges, etc.

So I drove to Welwyn Garden City to see Mo, former dancer / performance artist in ill-fated 90s guitar combo The Keatons, in order to ransack his archive of diaries and forget-ye-nots for a project I’m working on. I left his flat to discover another first; some delightful Hertfordshire resident had drawn what is known locally as a “bus-stop cock” in the dirt on the roof of my car, along with the affectionate tribute: “I Love Cock”. It’s reassuring, isn’t it, that in this world of hate and loathing, people can still find the time to point out the things that they are fond of in the dirt on the roof of a 12-year-old Ford Fiesta Fashion.

That’s the end of the firsts. On Saturday, I received a postcard hand-delivered through my front door, advising me that my local pub had “gone gastro”. Has your local pub “gone gastro”? Often, when local pubs “go gastro” it’s a bad thing, but when the pub is as dire as my local, you kneel, beg and pray that it might “go gastro”, just to offer an alternative destination on a long summer evening, or indeed short winter one. This pub used to be called the Freedom and Firkin, and was a tribute to 70s comedy show Citizen Smith, starring Robert Lindsay, and set in Tooting Broadway. Various items of Citizen Smith-related memorabilia were dotted around the pub, like, er, the black and white stripy scarf that Robert Lindsay wore, and that’s about it. For a brief time it became “The George” – nowhere near as glorious as its namesake in E8 – and today it goes by the name “The Garden House”. The postcard promises “fresh organic food, fine wines, real ales, coffees, an organic fruit and veg market, fresh flowers, WiFi, front and rear gardens…” So we popped round there, to find no food, average wine, no real ale, no WiFi, with the rear garden firmly closed. The usual clientele were standing around guzzling lager and wondering why Sky Sports had been replaced by some vaguely arty looking nuddie sketches, while the staff looked slightly distressed at the stream of people wandering in – having been prompted by the postcard – and wandering straight out again. Jenny asked the landlord what the plans were: he revealed that there would be fresh organic food, fine wines, real ales, coffees, an organic fruit and veg market, fresh flowers, WiFi, front and rear gardens… Surely the first rule of marketing (I imagine) is: don’t do your postcard drop until you’ve actually got any of that stuff in place. Insert witty conclusion here.