“When I see a guy lighting a goddamn cigarette as I come round the corner, I see a guy who ain’t taking the bus into town!” exclaims the bus driver, a competent black woman, who even as I feed my four one-dollar bills into the machine, is ramming the big, whooshing box up the ramp on to Route 101, heading north for San Francisco. “City of Industry” is the slogan picked out in big, white letters on the hillside ahead — presumably it’s some sort of riposte to “HOLLYWOOD”, but I doubt the Los Angelenos can read it at this distance.

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Ralph claims that this picture (right, in the Independent newspaper) faithfully reproduces a life-threatening encounter that he had with a grizzly bear during his most recent sojourn in Canada. According to Ralph, he drove the devilish bear off with his ink pot. It’s all lies, of course. I know because I’ve just been in Canada and I heard the whole story from several eye-witnesses who saw Ralph and the Grizzly together.

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Antony is going to Flevoland, where he’s erecting an enormous anthropoid statue, derived, as usual, from a cast of his own body. This one is going to be 25-metres high and welded together from the same steel girders used to build electricity pylons. We’re walking along the South Downs Way as he describes this to me: it’s a flat, grey day, and the grey-green humpbacked hills are like so many awesome cetaceans, migrating along the Sussex Weald.

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