Column by David in The Times.

IN MY LAST COLUMN, I TALKED ABOUT the tragic incident over Christmas when my partner’s copy of Marianne Faithfull’s recent memoir fell into the bath. Once again though, this page has come up trumps, as, upon reading it, Marianne’s publisher snapped into action, rushing us a brand, spanking new copy, dry as a bone, and signed, no less. This one should be fine, I think, as the dunking of the previous copy happened when we were away from our regular bath, which is equipped with a bath caddy. A bath caddy, as I’m sure all Times readers know, is a chrome bench with holders for such things as champagne glasses and candles, and a central well for a book. It’s basically the girliest item you can own, and I’m not sure you’re really allowed to use it for reading anything that isn’t by Cecilia Ahern.

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Column by David in The Times.

I’ll cut straight to the chase: I thought it was Jeanette Winterson’s turn this week. It’s getting harder to keep tabs on the alternating thing in general, I find, now that remembering what happened last weekend is like trying to cast your mind back to the Proterozoic era; but it’s especially hard at this time of year, when Books has had one week off, and another week when this page was written by the Literary Editor, and I spent New Year’s Day getting over a hangover induced by drinking the amount of champagne that you have to drink to get through the awkward interviews in between the music on Jools Holland’s Hootenanny. I was all set for my default first week of January — failing to keep any resolutions and thinking bleakly about onrushing mortality — when a phone call from this newspaper sent me into a terrible panic, wondering if I couldn’t blackmail Jeanette into doing it two weeks running by threatening to reveal the identity of her husband.

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Column by David in The Mail.

Once, I spent some time explaining to a German what was funny about Mrs Merton’s famous question to Debbie McGee: “What first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?”

It took over an hour – I’m not making this up – at the end of which he didn’t exactly laugh, he nodded his head sagely, and said, in the most classic ‘Allo ‘Allo! accent: “I zee. So ze answer is already in ze question?”

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