Last week’s column was done and dusted when I learned from The Times’s diary that — as I correctly speculated in it — the broadcaster Alan Whicker had indeed been much amused by Monty Python’s Whicker Island sketch.

He had watched it on television at the Dorchester Hotel — where else? — said his long-term partner Valerie Kleeman. “He loved it and wrote them a fan letter, adding a PS that they would be hearing from his solicitor.

“They sent him a signed photograph with the note ‘some evidence for your lawyer’.”

Mention of last week’s column, reminds me that I have been accused by a reader of failing to address specifically Wendy Greenberg’s complaint in a letter to the Editor about me, that I missed Oxford’s La Cucina out of my list of restaurants supplying robust Italian food.

Easy-peasy. I had been referring in my article to establishments that were in operation in my early years in Oxford and which still survived. La Cucina was set up in 2007.