All I'm saying is that Louis Vuitton and L'Oreal didn't invent branding at some point in the mid-Eighties. Big, reassuring names have been around a long time.

Successive generations of middle-class parents used to foist their own favourite books on their children. But some time in the late Eighties it began to wane - not because children had lost interest in adorable animals but because most of it was available on useful, pacifying video.

Have you got a Beemer, an Audi, a Saab or a Volvo that replaced a Ford, Vauxhall, Rover or Nissan? Many Brits have. Your first Beemer. A particularly nice smell of leather. Something rather plain but satisfactory about the interior. And that lovely enamel wotsit in the middle of the steering wheel. A moment of quiet 'because I'm worth it' pride.

It's just as well that I write in the same facile way wherever I am - no blocks or anguish, no contemplation, no elaborate revision, no need for love-tokens or nice views.

Prince William looks good in uniform and Man-at-Hackett black and white tie (he has grown up wearing it constantly); less certain in his suits, which sometimes look borderline archaic; and variable in casual. But completely comfortable in the Sloane uniform of non-designer jeans and chocolate-brown suede loafers. He'll look fine in Boden.

I can't actually read interviews with thesps now because they're almost always fantastically predictable, the men especially. Actors are forever stressing their ordinariness, their beer and football-loving commitments.

Real writers - serious writers with serious subjects, who earn their living at it - all seem to write in small rooms with that knotty-pine 1974 look on the top-floor rear of their houses. Rooms with views.