I have to say this not writing lark is curiously seductive. My trip abroad, followed by a period of feeling like death warmed up, has led to a sort of unplanned holiday from Hooting Yard and indeed from Het Internet generally. After bashing out three hundred and twenty essays in three hundred and twenty days, not to mention a myriad of other postages, it is with some relief that I have refrained from tippy-tapping sweeping paragraphs of majestic prose.

However, this does mean that I have failed to impart to you much decisive information, without which you are probably wandering the earth lost, twitching and shattered. I am thinking, for example, of a recent dream, in the course of which I attended a party at a retirement home for outrageous old thespians of the Donald Sinden stripe. One of these ageing hams was swaddled from head to foot in cloth of the deepest crimson, bemoaning that he had devoted his life to interpreting a minor character in a minor work by a minor dramatist. We then gathered for a screening of In Search Of The Most Pious Man : A Life Of Jesus, a film directed by Carrington Holmes.

I have tried, in my waking hours, to discover more about the dream film and the dream film director, to no avail. It seems neither of them actually exists. They ought to.