Before I start this column, I’ll declare an interest. Lots of people, when they’re drunk, have a weak spot, and do things they wouldn’t do sober. The phenomenon of “drunk dialling” – bothering an ex on the telephone – is well known. Mine is more niche: I get an AI robot to write an admiring poem to a public person I like, and send it to them in their X messages. My most recent was to Jeremy Vine.

My husband had enthused about Mr Vine for years, but I just couldn’t bring myself to watch/listen, having identified him as a cyclist – something he bangs on about a lot, and a breed I have no truck with. Not just a cyclist – but one of the most self-adoring, exhibitionist kind, as he proved last year when he took to riding a penny farthing around the streets of west London, on one occasion simply to meet his wife at their local. That’s showing off on a level that makes Madonna look like a Trappist monk.

But then, also last year, Vine did something strange and beautiful, which he wrote about in this newspaper. When his 18-year-old daughter asked if she could have a tattoo, and told him that it would be a Smiths lyric, and he would have the other half of it, he agreed. I thought it was about the most gorgeous and original demonstration of paternal love I’d seen. But more than that, in the course of it, Vine outed himself as a huge Smiths fan – this was a lovely bit of rebellion. We’re all meant to accept that Morrissey is “far right” and that decent, kind, caring people want nothing to do with him, so in displaying his fan-hood once in a newspaper and then repeatedly on his skin, Vine was showing his insouciant side. What on........

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