My friend the writer Victoria Mather, who besides being the travel editor of ‘Vanity Fair’, is among the most brilliant observers of la comedie humaine. Her several books, ‘Social Stereotypes’, document the recognisable bores, eccentrics, climbers, clingers and sheer dottiness of, and to, our national character, all culled from Victoria’s selfsame page, which until recently considerably brightened up the Saturday Telegraph Magazine.

But the other day she emailed me with a charmingly eccentric brief encounter of her own, and on the number 19 bus in Chelsea to boot.

Victoria, pink-lippied, fashionably swathed in a tangerine cashmere top by Hermes and holding her orange (“ the jobs I’ve slept with to buy that”) Birkin, was reading my memoir ‘Redeeming features’ as the bus sailed along the Kings’s Road. And, she reports, “a nice woman—-the 19 is a gentle bus—- leaned over and tapped a pale manicured nail on the cover, saying ‘how very chic to be reading a book to match your handbag’…….