To lose two looks like carelessness and deserves all the opprobrium we can muster.Yet Best, in the grip of an addiction arguably more terrible than a cheeseburger habit, has never tried to blame anyone but himself. Drunk or sober, Best can teach us a thing or two about dignity I hope he beats his demons. The rest of us should come to terms with the hard truth about having our cake and eating it. We cannot eat cake or burgers or even a low-cal Chicken McSandwich and have the moral high ground on obesity. But at least the choice is ours.What you can tell about a man from his booksWhat can they be putting in the claret at Cambridge these days? No sooner is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Stephen Hawking, spotted calculating the resistible force of a lap dancer called Tiger in Stringfellows than we hear about the fellow of Jesus College forced to resign over his extracurricular activity with call girls.Peter Smith, a philosophy lecturer, had, it turned out, been moonlighting as an external examiner for a local escort agency, reviewing the girls for a punters’ website. “It was a bit difficult,” said “Lucy”, one of the girls sent round to the college for appraisal.

“There were all these books around.”I think I know what she means You can tell a lot about a man from his bookshelves. As a student, when invited back to a boy’s room for sherry, I was always careful to sweep the room for suspect texts. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance showed lack of originality in 1979, but the situation was still negotiable. Any well-thumbed volumes by Tolkien, on the other hand, and I was out of there.But what can have so alarmed Lucy? Certainly, it can’t be easy for an escort to get on with her work in the stern shade of Immanuel Kant, who famously, if less than snappily, declared, “The surrender of one person to another for the satisfaction of sexual desire in return for money is the depth of infamy.” Nor is there much to encourage a working girl in C S Lewis (“Lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair.”)If only she had thought to scan the “20th-century (French)” shelf, the call girl – and, for that matter, her scholarly companion – might have found something more inspiring in the writings of J P Sartre. “If I became a philosopher,” said the wall-eyed Lothario of the Left Bank, “if I have too keenly seized this fame for which I’m still waiting, it has all been to seduce women, basically.” Plus, as they say on the Boul’ Mich’, ?change.Signs of the timesThe French may lead the field in seduction; Germans may beat us to the sun loungers; but the British are the best in Europe at making rude signs at one another.

A new driving survey suggests that we are more likely to flick two fingers at someone who annoys us on the road than we are to swear at them. Unfortunately, the survey doesn’t record the growing incidence of the sign used by women drivers to male aggressors – a measuring mime indicating something of pitifully slender girth – but my driving friends tell me it does the trick every time.I have always favoured the belt-and-braces approach when it comes to swearing, backing up the verbals with body language. As a teenager, I was given invaluable advice by an elegant old lady of my acquaintance. “Never call a man an arse,” she cautioned me; “always say ‘arsehole’. It leaves the mouth in a more attractive shape.” Try it in the mirror It works.. The auctioneer is looking at us, his punters and his audience, with a certain aquiline contempt.

It is Friday morning at the weekly auction and we are in some disused cow pens where bits of furniture – some old, some new, some a bit of both – are being sold. In a saleroom nearby, antiques will soon be going under the hammer and, elsewhere on the sale-ground, a variety of more practical items – TVs, guttering, tools, cutlery, airguns, a five-bar gate – are available. Standing before a battered, semi-stuffed armchair, he has plunged lower and lower in an attempt to elicit an opening bid from the assorted bunch of tourists, time-wasters and cheapskates that stand around him.”Come on,” he barks suddenly in the tone of man whose good humour is wearing thin “It’s only money. It’sthings you want, not money.”"Two pound,” mutters a regular standing near the front, and off we go.He is right, of course, our auctioneer. Money used to be what everyone wanted but these days we have discovered that it is not to be trusted; it shrinks, changes shape and generally lets you down while your back is turned.