My friends adore 'TOWIE' - the TV documentary series, 'The Only Way is Essex.' They like it, I'm afraid, for the most unworthy of reasons: class mockery. They tune in to wonder in a 'can you believe those people?' way at the natives of Brentwood and Buckhurst Hill.

I can remember when anything further downtown New York than Canal Street was risky and the whole area still looked like a 70s cop movie location; when the original loft-owners were more dash-than-cash, artistic types.

Men turn to formal wear when they want a new job or when they think their current one is in danger. They try to present themselves as powerful and successful.

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.

One should never learn from one's mistakes. Making the same mistakes, over and over again, is a source of unremitting pleasure.

The library was one more essential in the parade of rooms in a big 18th-century house - and part of the required kit ever afterwards. The important thing was to have the books, not actually read them.

The newsprint thesp celebrity interview as a middle-brow art form suffers from desperate overproduction. There'll be at least 10 in the broadsheets today and every Sunday hereafter.