By Friday teatime, on the escalator at Waverley Station, I find myself wondering how quickly I can find a priest. I don’t mean that so-called man of the cloth I saw unicycling round the Pleasance, flanked by two notably underdressed nuns and a guy dolled up as a Jammy Dodger; I’m after a bona fide, dog-collared friar who might absolve me of my guilt - if not my sins, on account of their number. Preferably one who could also be a sounding board with regard to some quite troubling feelings that have been aroused by a human biscuit.

The week had been going pretty well, till my wanton frailty ruined everything. I’d immersed myself in curative theatre (rave saunas); I’d dialled back on the peperamis; I’d even attempted a couple of meals complete with a token vegetable garnish (what mortals among us can resist the lure of the Happy Dumpling). My God, I’d confronted my darkest fears and come out relatively unscathed, but we’ll come to that.

What I hadn’t accounted for was this: a moment of weakness at the supermarket by the train station concourse; two meal-deal servings of some sort of thing that had been wildly and ambitiously (dare I say erroneously) cast as chicken satay; my wolfing both packets within ten seconds of leaving the shop and then immediately bumping into the great writer of this very parish, Teddy Jamieson.

Teddy was his usual debonair self - novel in one blazer pocket, well-thumbed notebook in the other - whilst I balanced the empty vestiges of my shameful dining in each hand, with Barbara Cartland’s Album of Love Songs ringing out across my ears, and that’s not to mention the noise pollution. (Still not over Steve Goldman’s exquisite Worst Record Covers in the World exhibition at the Assembly Studio Bar).

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Teddy is a gentleman and scholar both, but the existential shame was real, and I felt harshly seen - hence my urgent need for absolution, a nearby bin, and one or two vitamin supplements. That momentary lapse notwithstanding, however, I have been - as they say in the modern parlance - doing the work. I’ve even tried to shake off........

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