It's just chaff here, but at the Breeders Cup it's all golden wheat.

This is the time of year when the big brands start their annual PR splurge to remind people to give the Big Brand for Christmas. As luck would have it, the reminder, new launch, and Christmas ad spins tend to coincide with a round of DEI-focused, London-centric Diwali parties, except in the 80s, DEI stood for Drinking Exclusively and Insatiably. Nowadays, of course, it’s all so much more worthy, but I was sad to miss Chanel’s annual Diwali bash at Berkeley Square. Very chichi. Masses of good stuff to drink, hundreds of beautiful people, smelling delicious and a to-die-for menu featuring… Steak. Holy Cow!

I suspect it’s true of almost all writers, be they hacks, pros, novelists, or, like me, scratchers. Each writer has a personal drawer, in which the What The Hells are kept alongside the Whys? In some households, it is essentially where Monsieur keeps the missing socks, underpants that don't quite fit, collar stiffeners that aren't stiff, ties with stains that might be removable if one were so inclined. This drawer in scribble-land contains all the articles, posts, thoughts, and scripts that need to be put out of their misery or else introduced to a polishing stone with magical powers. Think writing of such woeful content that if it were passed to Deep Thought, the World’s most powerful computer, as conceived by Douglas Adams, and one asked it to fix the content, the facts, the dullness and the grammar, it would simply say “No” in a booming voice. The blue light in the bottom right-hand corner would stop blinking, or, worse, turn red, and the total stillness would be so broad it would feel like the extinction of life everywhere.

That is what I have been through this morning. There are nine pieces in the drawer, and one of them is so dire that even the dog, who I think understands English and is just selectively deaf, left the room and took to his bed when I was reading it aloud.

It might, of course, be the voice, which would be mortifying. We all tend to bind up and store those little praises, and mine, sadly, is that I was once told I had the perfect face and body for Radio. That was after a screen test and audition with the newly launched Channel 5, which was going to “do” sports gambling. Anyway, nothing came of that, except that I learned never to wear a red sweater over a blue striped shirt while wearing red moleskins on TV. On the playback afterwards, it looked like a tube of toothpaste had been ejected into space from an airlock and imploded, inside out, due to the vacuum.

I used to do quite a lot of local radio for BBC Thames Valley and BBC Southern Counties. But then I lost the gig after