Are we all becoming better informed – or is it just me?

The difference between the debt and the deficit, I quite often find myself telling people, is like the difference between your overdraft and the gulf between what you earn and what you need. Even if you could reset the former to zero, somehow, the latter still be there, forever dragging you down.

‘But aren’t you the guy who writes a whimsical made-up diary in which you pretend to be Cheryl Cole, or tell sex jokes about Silvio Berlusconi?’ they’ll frequently reply. And they’re right, because that’s exactly who I am. But I’m bloody clever, too. I know loads of stuff. Lots of us do. More, I increasingly think, and more.

I never expected to know stuff. I never thought I was the sort. It doesn’t seem so long ago that I’d have thought that devolution max was a cough drink, or that Sunni and Shia were the couple who sang ‘I Got You Babe’. Yet here I am, all of a sudden, broadly understanding what a Higgs Boson is, aware of why it matters that Hamid ­Karzai is a Pashtun, and liable to not even snigger, at least half the time, when I hear the name ‘King Bhumibol’.

This isn’t just me showing off, you understand. Not wholly. I might be kidding myself, I might be wrong, I might be doing that unforgiveable thing that so many journalists do, in which they blithely induct the universal from a clutch of homogenous berks at a dinner party. But I think we’re all getting a bit smarter, aren’t we? There’s just so much news all the time; so much more than there used to be. It gets flung at our collective consciousness, like mud against a wall, and some of it surely sticks.