I ate some hake last night. Keith and Elliot and myself went to Fish Central, 149 Central Street, EC1, for slightly upmarket fish and chips. The waiting staff could probably be officially labelled “jovial”; when we arrived and asked where the Gents was, he said “no, my friend, only ladies toilets here.. Haha! No, seriously, my friend, they are over there on the left.” Jesus. Actually, toilets raise absolutely fascinating grammatical issues – you know, “can you tell me where the ladies is”, that kind of thing. I’ll let you squabble amongst yourselves on that one.

We then went to the Wenlock, the noted down-at-heel back-street boozer. I thought it was on Wenlock Street. It wasn’t, it was on Wenlock Road. Or is it the other way around? Anyway, my error necessitated a gentle tiptoeing through some pretty grim estates. We resisted the temption to loudly bray stuff like “I say, the levels of poverty here are fascinating, simply fascinating.” Keith can’t usually be relied upon not to do things like that, but he somehow managed it. Once at the pub, the barman moodily dispensed pints of dark brown liquid called “Worcestershire Sauce”, which looked and tasted not unlike Worcestershire Sauce. Keith asked for a “Worcestershire Sauce” and got a quizzical look. “You mean Worcester Sauce?” “Er, yeah.” Clearly if you refer to the county, rather than the town, you’re a f*cking p*of, or something. Brrr. Occasionally I was left on my own in the bar while Elliot and Keith went outside for a Lucky Strike, or, as they called it, a Lungy Stroke.

I’ve been playing quite a lot of Facebook Scrabble. I’ve worked out that players generally fall into two categories: the incredibly competitive ones, who have memorized all the permissible 2-letter words of dubious origin, such as, I dunno, QI or XU, and batter their opponents into submission with astonishing matrices of tiles to the sound of loud and sustained complaints. “GRIBLXSNA isn’t a f*cking word!” Then there’s the others, who are righteous, pure, upstanding players who don’t try out every combination of letters on the board on the offchance that it flukes a permissible combination. I’m the former, obviously. Sorry. If computer says yes, computer says yes. And when you’re up against publicansdecoy, you need all the luck and deviousness you can muster.

I now have a temporary pass to the BBC building, after the pin on the visitors pass stabbed me viciously in the arse yesterday while I revolved through a revolving door. The temporary pass has no dangerous prongs or sharp corners or caustic sodas.

I think I watched some of the Posh Spice documentary last night, but it’s really hard to access the part of my brain that was devoted to absorbing it. I’m roaring through my British history book, though. Up to the 13th century, now. I know everything. Go on, ask me anything, anything at all, well, anything except that, or that, but yes, ask me anything at all, well, nearly anything.

(Oh, Keith dispensed the most cringeworthy anecdote last night, in which he tried to impress someone at work – he works at the World Service, by the way – by giving a Hitler salute. His telling of it to his previous girlfriend might have partly contributed to the end of the relationship. Yes, it’s that bad.)