Is Nick Clegg the verruca of British politics? I only ask – in fact, it’s something I asked Sadie, a nice woman who held my gnarled and calloused foot between her parted thighs for half an hour in a south London consulting room early this week, then charged me £28 for the privilege. I hasten to add that Sadie’s thighs were sheathed in denim and far from being a fetishists’ assistant, she was a chiropodist.   More...

“If you show me your breasts I’ll give you £35,” was perhaps an inopportune remark to make to the middle-aged commuter sitting opposite me in the first-class carriage of the 14.30 Taunton service out of London Paddington on Tuesday afternoon. I was only going as far as Bath Spa, but from the expression that darkened his features I immediately realised I was already in very hot – and possibly even sulphurous – water.   More...

My daily go-round has a menacing stereotypy: I walk the dog with such regularity it’s hard to know which of us is on the lead. I’d like to be able to say that the business of publicising a new book – with readings, interviews and so on – is something of a departure, but it ain’t so. I’ve been trundling to Bristol, Bath, Brighton and Birmingham year in year out for almost two decades now, so that these journeys have the quality of an annual progress by some cut-rate monarch viewing his papery pop-up dominions.   More...