I haven’t got up yet, which is scandalous, as it’s 6pm. I mean, I have got up – I’ve been working hard, although obviously I’ve avoided manual labour, as usual – but I haven’t changed into my outdoor clothes. If I went outdoors in the clothes I’m currently wearing, I’d at best be jeered at by passing lorry drivers, and at worst have the shit kicked out of me by the Tooting Massive (and believe me, they are massive.)

Anyway, I had a pleasant surprise yesterday. Actually, I had a pleasant surprise on Friday, when Parcelforce dropped a card through my door saying that they had a parcel for me. Usually I keep very detailed notes on all the parcels that might be arriving at my flat, and this one somehow failed to show up in the detailed notes. Actually, it isn’t notes, it’s more of a ledger, really. “What could it be?” I asked Jenny. “What could what be?” she replied. “Oh, nothing,” I said. We have a lot of those kind of conversations.

It turned up on Monday afternoon. It was a hamper, with a bottle of wine in it, as a thank-you present for a moderately interesting talk I gave at UCL last week about how not to become a freelance writer. I don’t believe I’ve ever been sent a hamper before, so it was a great moment for me. Of course, next time I get a hamper, I’ll be expecting a bigger one than this, with truffles, and maybe the one after that should have a Jereboam of champagne in it – in fact, 2 Jereboa – and so on, until I’m 80 and I finally get a hamper containing a woman in lingerie waving a winning lottery ticket, at which point I’ll suffer an aneurysm.

Still, a bottle of wine in a hamper, eh. Drop of Australian chardonnay, 2004 vintage, anyone? It’s from the Rosemount Estate, apparently – which, if it’s anything like the Brewers Hill Estate in Dunstable, is an area best avoided. I’m beginning to sound ungrateful. I’m not. I will now be quiet.