I have been reading, for review purposes, an enormous book by the writer Jonathan Meades (spoiler: it’s very good), but it is so enormous that I find I am almost becoming breathless from the effort it takes to hold it. And I am beginning to have those kind of puzzling aches which make me feel as though my time is drawing rather nearer and swifter than I would like. That twinge in the shoulder, that ache from the deep regions of the back. And then I notice that my hand has turned blue.
Naturally, I do the most sensible thing anyone could do under the circumstances: I get into another fight on Twitter. This one was over my column the other week, in which I told the story about Boris Johnson being horrible to a working-class interviewee at Balliol. Someone called Lord Moylan stepped in to speak up for Johnson’s good character, never an easy thing to pull off, and to denigrate my standards of journalism. “I am not a journalist,” I replied, “I am a columnist and critic. And you, my Lord, are now being a bore.”
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