Pink, Paxman and peppermint creams

I was on my way home from returning the Ill-Advised Tartan last night – just managing to limbo under the 28-day-returns threshold – when I saw someone else, an actual celebrity and a Proper, Clever One too, experiencing an episode of wardrobe dementia. There, pacing up and down London Bridge waiting to film something almost certainly involving his Eyebrows Of Scepticism And Also Of Sternness, was Jeremy Paxman, over-coordinating his hot-pink shirt with a hot-pink face. Times are hard for the BBC, of course, but you'd think one of his skeleton filming crew would have had a second to look up from their multi-tasking and politely say, 'Excuse me, Jeremy, do you have another shirt? It's just that yours is kind of the same colour as your face. If it wasn't for your hair, you'd look like a walking suit with shoes.' Something else they might say is, 'Jeremy, can we have a conversation about sun block?' And also, 'Jeremy, I know we are colleagues and everything, but you are looking kind of hot for 58.'

In other news, I was excited to see a Fry's Peppermint Cream on sale in Holland & Barrett today. Excited, of course, for two reasons. Firstly, despite being made exclusively from chocolate and sugar, the Peppermint Cream appears to have officially qualified as a health food. And secondly, I'd come to believe that the Fry's Peppermint Cream had become the JD Salinger of chocolate bars. If it wasn't for Dulwich's original, and most magical, branch of Hope & Greenwood, I would rarely come across one, since its place on the cornershop chocolate smorgasbord seems to have been usurped by depraved varieties of KitKat and laboratory-concocted Frankenstein-style energy bars. I miss the elegance of the Fry's brand (apart from the blandness of the plain old Billy No-Flavour Chocolate Cream). Anyway, disappointment was looming, of course. When I opened it back at my desk, I found the chocolate was covered in that mysterious white bloom common to bars of chocolate given to you by your grandparents. Then I noticed it was past its sell-by date. This, of course, had only made it entirely at home in its lodgings on Camden High Street.