One drawback - or possibly advantage - of being known as an easily riled automated curmudgeon is that people tend to hurl recommendations my way. "Here, look at this," they chortle, holding something irritating under my nose. "You'll hate it."

Usually the item in question is merely a bit disappointing. But the other day someone urged me to buy the latest copy of Tatler and read the Little Black Book section. "It's absolutely unbelievable," they said. I was intrigued enough to pop to the newsagents and cough up my £3.80. Even though I don't think I've ever read an edition of Tatler in my life, I had a general sense that being seen with it in public was a bad idea, so I turned the magazine around, hiding the cover against my chest as I left so no one could see what I was carrying. Better to let the passersby assume I'm carrying a porn mag, I figured - although the whopping great advert for Cartier diamond jewellery on the back probably gave the game away. I don't think they advertise in Barely Legal.

Once I was safely out of sight, I gingerly opened the magazine and started reading. Three seconds later, I was furious. Before getting to the Little Black Book section, I'd alighted on an article about a "sexy Holland Park billionairess and her fabulous life". She was called Goga Ashkenazi, and she was pictured swathed in fur, diamonds dripping pendulously from her ears. She was clutching a miniature dog that looked like it'd been peeled; one of those scrawny upholstered canine skeleton-creatures with the facial tics of a tiny frightened bird. Given the alarming way these micro-dogs pant 5,000 times a second, I always think they're about to die, that their pea-sized hearts will suddenly burst like a popcorn kernel inside their mousey little ribcage.

But Goga wasn't worried. She was smiling. As well she might. If she wanted, she could buy a million dogs and spend a month hurling them into a threshing machine for chuckles. According to the article, she's so rich she "summons private jets like most people hail cabs", and once lost a "£500,000 piece of wrist candy", shrugged, and simply put on another one. It describes her as "a sort of 21st-century Holly Golightly", which seems a bit harsh. Holly Golightly was a call girl. Ashkenazi is an oligarch with her own goldmine. And maybe she's lovely, but the article was so fawningly, nauseatingly dazzled by how much money she's got, it'd be impossible for any sane human being reading it not to thoroughly despise her by the end.

Shaken, I turned to the Little Black Book section, which turned out to be an authoritative A-Z of overprivileged arseholes (most of them still in their early 20s), plus the occasional celeb, rated and compiled by the single biggest group of wankers in the universe. You're supposed to want to sleep with these people, and the text attempts to explain why. It's the ultimate in self-celebratory nothingness, 2,000 times worse than the worst ever article in Heat magazine. It includes five lords, six ladies, four princes, five princesses, two viscounts, three earls, a marquess, and 16 tittering poshos whose names are prefixed with the phrase "The Hon" (which, I've just discovered, means they're the son or daughter of a viscount or baron). Names like Cressida, Archie, Guy, Blaise and Freddie feature heavily. How annoying is it? Put it this way: James Blunt is also on the list, and he's the least objectionable person there.

Each entry takes the form of a chortling mini-biog guaranteed to make you want to punch the person it describes flat in the face. Thus, we learn that "Jakie Warren" is "the heartthrob who lives in the coolest house in Edinburgh and has the initials of all his best friends tattooed on his thigh. You can touch them but he'll make you buy shares in the racing syndicate he co-owns with Ed Sackville ... Good in bed, we hear."

Or consider "The Hon Wenty Beaumont": "The growl, the growl - girls go weak for the growl ... Utterly divine Christie's kid who enjoys nothing more than playing Pass the Pig during weekends at the family estate in Northumberland or in Saint-Tropez."

In other words, the only thing these waddling bags of arseflesh have going for them is unrestricted access to a vast and unwarranted fortune. Strip away the coins and it reads like a list of the most boring people in Britain.

As an additional poke in the ribs, each entry is accompanied by a tiny photograph, so you can squint into the eyes of the cosseted stranger you've suddenly decided to hate. The girls are technically pretty in a uniform, Sloaney kind of way, while the men are more varied, falling into three main categories: dull preening James Blunt types, dull preening indie types, and simpering ruddy-cheeked oafs who look like they're about to pull a pair of underpants over their head and run around snorting like a hog in a bid to impress a blind-drunk debutante.

In summary, it's an entire alternate dimension of shit, a galaxy of streaming-eye fart gas, compressed into a few glossy pages. It will have you alternating between rage, jealousy, bewilderment and distress, before dumping you in a bottomless slough of despond. Buy a copy. No, don't. Stand in a shop flipping through the pages, deliberately fraying each corner as you go. Drink it in. Feel your impotent anger levels peaking. The headrush is good for you. Try it. You'll hate it. Thanks for the recommendation. I'm off for a cry.

• This week Charlie got halfway through You Cannot Live as I Have Lived and Not End Up Like This: The Thoroughly Disgraceful Life and Times of Willie Donaldson, a biography of Willie "Henry Root" Donaldson: "Now there's an interesting posho; a man whose shambolic life reads like a bucket of jokes being kicked down the stairs."