By now, regular visitors (Hello, regular visitors!) will know that I help run a book review site as a sort of sideline. It’s becoming ridiculously and terrifyingly successful (11,000 views last month, and likely to be more this month, the way it’s shaping up) and one of the results of that is that publishers start wooing you to review their books. We currently have free run of the catalogues of several large publishers, which is nice, but a not unmixed blessing, as I am currently finding out to my cost.

I am presently trying to review a wildly expensive and glossy book sent to me by a publisher. I need to be honest without actually saying, “It’s a brilliant idea but couched in such horribly convoluted academic twaddle-speak that it’s borderline unreadable, and even the illustrations are - well - meh.” To do so would be unfair on the author and might also discourage the specialist readers to whom it will probably become a definitive work. It would also be a cheap shot.

I recognize, in other words, that it was not written for urchins like me in spite of the fact that the publisher breezily informs us that it’s suitable for the general reader.

I’ll make it. The review will be accurate and fair and informative, and will say all the things it needs to say without actually - well - saying them. It will be and do all those things because 20 years of working in THIS surreal joint have refined my diplomatic skills to the point where they have become second nature.

Somebody brings in a pile of jumble that is so foetid it virtually crawls up the front steps all by itself?

“Gosh - isn’t that an interesting …. metal thing?”

The entire contents of somebody’s grandma’s house arrives just after you’ve spent most of the day clearing the LAST delivery of tat from the front hall:

“Good timing! I’m in jumble-sorting mode today!”

(Don’t get me wrong -  we like and welcome jumble - it’s just that sometimes everybody seems to wake up on the same day and think, “Right!  It’s jumble to the Chase day today!!” - and there we are, hip deep in horsehead ice buckets …)

Twenty-five years’ worth of Pig Farmers’ Weekly magazines are proudly handed over in collapsing cardboard boxes with the sentiment: I was going to throw these out, but then I thought of you …

“Oh that’s wonderful … they always move very quickly.” (Straight out the back door into the wheelie bins …)

Or, of course, the ultimate catch-all that covers a multitude of situations:

“Oh - what a KIND thought …”.

It’s the Diplomatic Corps’ loss, I’m telling you . . .