Jenny’s working for a newspaper at the moment, editing a series of summer food supplements. One of them is entitled “Salads”, so it won’t surprise you to hear that the contents of this supplement are largely cold and hard, or leafy and soft. Yesterday she produced a shopping list of fruit and vegetables that she needed for a photo-shoot later today, which included beetroot, radishes and gooseberries. “Gooseberries?” I asked, incredulously. “Yep,” she said, “they’re in season.” Thing is, it doesn’t matter when gooseberries are in season, because they’re so bitter and acidic that you may as well kiss the roof of your mouth goodbye, if that were physically possible. “However, radishes,” I said – possibly for the first time in my life – and opened the fridge to reveal some. I’ve got quite into radishes, recently. They’re not particularly versatile, you can’t really base a meal around them, but I see them as a pleasant, slightly rogueish surprise. Particularly in ice cream. But my radishes were no good for Jenny, because they didn’t have the leafy bits on the top – an essential, for photographic purposes. When we went out to the shops of SW London, retailers showed a distinct lack of interest in providing produce which would look suitable on the front cover of a magazine. The beetroot resembled filthy tennis balls, and the leaves on the top of the radishes had long since given up self-preservation in the face of overwhelming traffic fumes from the A24. We bought them, anyway, in the hope that shoving them in a bowl of water would somehow revive them. Then up to Wimbledon, and the hilariously expensive Bayley & Sage grocery store, where at Christmas they had Hansel & Gretel gingerbread housees to tempt kids at the counter instead of Mars Bars. They had no gooseberries, obviously, but they did have radishes with perfect leaves sprouting out of the top, so we bought them. What I’m trying to say is that I’ve got so many bloody radishes here that I’m considering changing my surname to Radish.

Saturday was spent at Interesting2007, a rather marvellous conference-type-thing with several fascinating speakers talking about such diverse subjects as logs, Ibsen, getting comedy shows commissioned, exploding bacon and pneumatic messaging systems. I played the saw just before lunch in a slightly self-conscious way. The waves of applause that followed my performance were as much to do with the massed anticipation of buying a nice sandwich from the cafe next door as anything, I feel. Anyway, next time (if there is a next time, and there might be, as someone from innocent asked me to play at their village fete, although my conditions are, as ever, that they tone down the cutesy copywriting) I’ll wear a big golden cloak and sellotape fireworks to my head.