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About 20 years ago, the actor and comedian Steve Coogan did a tour called, with typical self-deprecation, Steve Coogan as Alan Partridge and Other Less Successful Characters. I saw the show and it was, as you’d expect from Coogan, amusing and cleverly performed. Yet it ended strangely; Coogan sang a self-lacerating song called ‘Everyone’s a Bit of a Cunt Sometimes’. It was oddly bitter and angry, but clearly Coogan stood by its sentiments, because he attempted to reprise the number in a dream sequence from his restaurant-review comedy The Trip several years later. The song, given full production values, was, perhaps wisely, deleted from the programme’s final cut. (Although you can still find

It is, officially, ‘cosy’ season. My social-media feeds have suddenly become very homely and wholesome: full of pictures of chunky knitwear, crisp leaves, soft blankets, flickering candles and crackling fires. I want to embrace this romanticisation of winter, I really do. I want to enjoy this slower routine of fluffy pyjamas, Christmas movies and aesthetically pleasing pumpkin lattes. I want to say that I love coming home from work, drawing the curtains and snuggling on the sofa with a glass of red and a paperback. I want to laugh that it doesn’t matter if I don’t see direct sunlight for the next four months because I can wear cashmere socks

I thought that maybe being in a wheelchair would stop my louche lunching ways, but somewhat to my own surprise (though not that of my mates, I’d wager), this isn’t the case. ‘You push – I’ll pay!’ has become my battle cry. But as I am wheeled about at this time of year, a pucker of irritation repeatedly flickers across my features. Pumpkin this, pumpkin that – all leading inevitably to the monstrosity that is pumpkin spiced latte. The final straw in my deciding that pumpkin spiced lattes are utterly, well, deplorable was when the ghastly Hillary Clinton described herself as a fan – ‘until I saw how many calories

To a certain extent, all doctoral theses are a bit ridiculous – and therein lies their genius. I am allowed to say this because I spent four years of my life researching French Catholicism’s engagement with the first world war for my doctoral thesis, which I nattily entitled Calvary or Catastrophe? Back then, I was a baby academic hoping for critical acclaim and my own office. I’ve long since been disabused of this dream and have left academia’s dreaming spires behind to become a journalist – a profession that offers me neither my own office nor critical acclaim, but a great deal of online abuse. And while I don’t expect

Football has a problem: there isn’t enough football. The world’s most popular thing is too popular. Fans seem to find it ludicrous that our entertainment is constrained by flesh and blood, that we can’t – like with everything else – just watch live football when we feel like it. It started to get like this when Sky bought the Premier League rights and set up the Sky Sports channels. They had realised people really like this stuff. People like it enough for you to air football content endlessly. Throughout the 2000s came Premier League Years, where people could watch football that happened ten years ago. If you were bored of