Giles Coren eats fried seal loin with Eva Avila

My week began on a plane to Quebec, where I’m filming a show for Canadian television. It is a broadcast pilot for a format of my own devising and, if it flies, I stand to make billions. But first it must succeed in Canada. Because Canada is the country that has bravely chosen to try it first, and shelled out the initial moolah. I am delighted that my show is getting its big chance in this great country, rather than boring old America, say, or England. I love Canada. I have always said it is the most culturally innovative and pleasant-to-visit country on earth. (I have never been to Canada in my life before.)

I flew in, as it happens, on the very day that the Bank of Canada announced the phasing out of the penny from circulation. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I feel sad to have missed the Golden Age of Affordable Canada. The country where once upon a time certain very small items could be purchased for a single centi-unit of its currency is no more. Local feeling is that prices will rise as vendors round up to the next available coin denomination and create inflation. Penny chews, tragically, could soon cost as much as five cents. On the other hand, Canadians can afford this kind of price hoik, because theirs is the only major developed world economy to have survived the banking crisis unharmed, thanks to the ministrations of the former head of their national bank, Mark Thingummy, who is now Governor of the Bank of England. So perhaps we Brits will soon be so rich that we don’t need pennies either. Furthermore, I am here to make money, not spend it. And if I had thought the Canadians were going to pay me in pennies, I think I would probably not have come.