On Monday night I was at a venue that felt vaguely familiar. Suddenly it all flooded unpleasantly back: it was there that, sometime in the 1980s, somebody gave me some cocaine. I had never had any before, but since I was desperate to be regarded as cool I obviously couldn’t turn it down, and I had watched enough movie scenes of drug-taking to sniff it through a rolled £5 note with the insouciance of one who had been hoovering up kilos of the stuff since she was in short trousers.

The effect was swift and satisfactory. I became hilariously funny and my views on everything became even more interesting than they usually are. It was only when the high began to wear off and I