Wednesday. Am sitting here in Highgate before going to pick up the keys from Ms Claudia for my week-long house-sit and cat-sit in Archway. Well, technically it’s more Upper Holloway. It’s Hatchard Road, at a fair block away from the main traffic.

Awake this morning and put on the local radio news, ie BBC London. Another teenager stabbed to death. In Holloway, in fact. Tollington Way. Which is a few streets down the road. In daylight.

‘[Mother of the murdered 14-year-old boy]Mrs Dinnegan said: “I’ve just been speaking to one of Martin’s friends and he says it’s because apparently they were looking at each other in the wrong way.” ‘ (BBC News website)

And so I find my mind jumping through the hoops of it’ll-be-all-right-ness. Hatchard Road is the NICER end of Holloway. And I’m not a teenager. Yet when I was a trembling teenager, treading in fear of my classmates, I used to think, ‘Ah well, I won’t be a teenager for ever. I’ll be an adult. And then I’ll be okay.’

Now I am an adult in my mid-30s. And yet I still walk the streets with unease, in fear of attack from teenagers. Something is very wrong in this equation. The meek aren’t inheriting the world any time soon, ‘Man’.

The use of the word ‘man’ in so-called ‘youth’ conversation, as a suffix to a sentence. Most used by boys under 20. Boys say ‘man’ to each other. Actual men do not.

‘Yeah, man.’

The above utteration is as alien to me as the squawks of a fictional Martian chicken.

***

Dinner today in Hampstead, at the kind behest of Ms Clarke. Mr MacGowan is there, as is Ms Clarke’s father Tom. Whose eccentricity is legend. The first thing he says to me is this:

Tom: Ah, I remember you. You don’t like being hairy, do you? Would you mind showing me your nether regions? I’m curious.

He is in his fifties. And this is a well-to-do Italian restaurant in Hampstead.

Ms Clarke finds all this entertaining, at a dinner table with the three strangest men in the world. One of which is her father, another is her fiancee. The other is me. She happily scribbles down our unlikely dialogue, for potential use in her newspaper column. Otherwise, who would believe it?

This includes my retort to her father:

Me: With respect, sir, I refuse to pander to your kinkiness.

Which is the sort of thing others only write down. But which I say in person, with my real mouth.

Elsewhere in the city, Gordon Brown becomes Prime Minister, years after a deal made in a London restaurant. The details will always remain a secret between the new PM and the old one, but one suspects the requests made were somewhat less interesting than those asked of me over the pasta today.

We repair to the politely gay William IV pub, and Ms Clarke’s father is still incorrigible, chatting up passing Iranian lesbians and black men alike. Mr MacGowan is, for once, entirely upstaged.

Once both Clarkes leave, it’s just me and Mr Pogue once more in a public place. And it’s business as usual. By which I mean a couple of people insist on coming over, dragging their chairs to our pub table, and saying they know of a relative who does a really good Kirsty MacColl part in ‘Fairytale Of New York’. And would Mr MacGowan be interested if he ever needs a singer…?

Mr MacG is as gracious as ever, but once again I sit there and choke back a haughty glower, principally because the attention is for him, not me. Still, it never ceases to amaze me how some people feel they have have carte blanche to invite themselves over to someone’s table – even interrupting a conversation – purely because they recognise a face off the popular media.

I think it’s more practical – if you like to be left alone – to become famous for being grumpy, like Liam Gallagher or the reputed foul-mouthed chef Gordon Ramsay. Then when strangers suddenly drag their pub chairs to your table, and you tell them to get knotted, they scamper away with your reputation consolidated rather than damaged. ‘He told us to get stuffed – isn’t that wonderful! So HIM!’

A friend of mine mentions he played a gig recently where Rufus Wainwright was in the audience, but with his back to the stage and talking constantly throughout the performance. I suspect the slighted friend is now unlikely to buy any more Rufus Wainwright CDs.

Had the chatty celeb been Gordon Ramsay, where rude behaviour is part of the lovable act, all parties would have been happy.

Moral: If you must be famous, and must be rude, be famous for being rude.