She was blonde. She was beautiful. She was driving some poxy little Citroën or Peugeot thing … And she had just overtaken me … And let me tell you, I wasn’t having it. Because if there is one thing calculated to make the testosterone slosh in your ears like the echoing sea and the red mist of war descend over your eyes, it’s being treated as though you are an old woman by a young woman … the whole endocrine orchestra said, ‘Go. Take.’ You can’t be dissed by some blonde in a 305.

That, from Boris, is in Coren’s ‘guzzling’ style — glug, glug, glug. And if you want the real thing, it’s available in Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks: The Essential Alan Coren (Canongate, £20), a dazzling selection of the master’s pieces, edited and introduced by his children, Giles and Victoria Coren. Those two very bright sparks present their foreword as a double-act, a witty dialogue. Then the articles from each decade, from 1960 onward, are introduced by other writers.

Melvyn Bragg, who was at Wadham, Oxford, with Coren, remembers him there. Coren took a First in English and seemed headed for an academic career, but Bragg, I’m sure rightly, thinks that ‘the necessary tortoise pace of serious research would have driven him screaming mad’, adding, ‘he was blessed with what was almost a disease of humour … It never took him more than a few minutes to torpedo even the most serious conversation with wit meant to sink it’.

Giles Coren enviously writes that his father belonged (as did I) to

that generation of 1950s grammar-school boys — the Alan Bennetts, the Melvyn Braggs, the Dennis Potters — that brief window between two educational Dark Ages, when a certain kind of lower-middle-class boy got a chance, went to Oxford and had a crack at the Establishment.

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