How to Spot a Loser

I wasn't sorry to see that Martha Stewart, America's most famous hostess, and a woman who makes Nigella Lawson sound like a barmaid in EastEnders, is in trouble for possible insider trading. Most magazines are designed for people who feel inadequate - for example did you ever see a young man reading FHM or Loaded or Maxim who looked as if he could even talk to a woman, never mind have a girlfriend? - and Martha Stewart Living was for those deeply unhappy people who are terrified that their own company is not enough attraction for their friends.

When we lived in the States you could always tell someone who had a subscription. The table would be decorated with an elegant if overstated arrangement of dried leaves and pine cones sprayed with silver. The cutlery was of a fake French design, and the crystal ware was all identical so that you could never remember, during the pre-dinner drinks, which was your glass. There might even be tiny gifts for the guests, wrapped in gold-flecked parchment and silk ribbons, and the food would be chosen mainly because it looked perfectly symmetrical on the plate. "Look," it screamed, "we've gone to all this trouble for you! Please like us!"

Of course the opposite does not apply. I hate trekking out to dinner and being told: "We just thought we'd have a bucketful of spag bol and everyone can help themselves!" This is usually accompanied by those two litre bottles of Sainsbury's generic red. Or those depressing buffets - "don't wait, dig in!" - including rice salad, quiche, and horrid little beige cocktail sausages.

There must be a happy medium. Maybe I should start a magazine called Simon Hoggart's Just Good Enough, offering handy tips such as "nobody cares if all the napkins are different" and "it's not the Georgian claret decanter that counts, it's the amount of wine you throw down your guests ..."

Is it just me, or where I live, or are there far more people demanding our attention in the street these days? This week I needed to walk from Tottenham Court Road tube in London, along Oxford Street, then north up Regent Street to the BBC. On the way I counted all the people who accosted me. There was a busker in the tube, two beggars - "sperryeny change?" - three Big Issue sales personnel, a man offering two-for-one coupons at a pizzeria, a woman with leaflets for cheap beauty products (though she swerved away from me, clearly seeing me as a lost cause), a young woman offering Midweek, a giveaway magazine, a man pushing flyers for a sale of Italian suits, someone who I suspect was carrying out a fake "survey" which would prove I needed double glazing, and no fewer than three "chuggers" which, I gather, is the term for charity muggers, those people with clipboards who want you to sign a standing order for their good cause.

I'm afraid I ignore them all with the occasional exception of the Greenpeace people, whom, if I'm feeling cross, I favour with my theory that Greenpeace has done more to harm the lives of the world's poor than any single multi-national. It's fun to see the look on their faces.

Why do we try to avoid all these people? After all, I could easily afford 20p for the beggars, the magazines might include one interesting article, and with the leaflets I could get cheap food, or clothing. I suspect it's because sub-consciously we carry our private space with us everywhere, like a small caravan, as protection against the world, and don't want people to invade it, however good their intentions.

Sir Teddy Taylor says that the figures for beer consumption at the Commons indicate that MPs are more pissed than ever. The chairman of the relevant committee says it's an auditing trick, and little has changed. But it has. MPs can be terrifyingly sober these days. I can recall a time when no late-night division was complete without a scuffle somewhere, often in the chamber itself. And when I started there, the house frequently went on sitting till two or three in the morning, leaving members with little to do but drink. Now, apart from the Strangers Bar, which can get pretty riotous now and again, the place is calm and placid, with MPs sitting in their offices, slurping tea, and getting on with their endless constituency workload. Wimps. They ought to drink a lot more.

Anyway, like many teetotallers, Sir Teddy has little idea about drink. Another abstainer, Tony Benn, once offered me a scotch in the middle of the afternoon. He produced a bottle from his filing cabinet, and to my horror, filled a half-pint tumbler to the brim. I took one sip; heaven knows what he did with the rest.

I've got a book of selected sketches coming out (Playing to the Gallery, from the Guardian's official publisher, Grove Atlantic) and amazingly it has an index. The indexer has done a spiffy job, perhaps too spiffy, since I don't think anyone in their right mind would look up "agricultural policy" in the hopes of enlightenment from me about the CAP, or "penal reform" if that was an issue they took seriously. I wondered whether we oughtn't to drop the index altogether, since a lot of people look themselves up, then ignore the whole book if they're not in.

So, as a compromise, I have taken all the names - except for glancing references - and inserted a little insult, a poison pellet, into the index, in the perhaps vain hope of shaming them into buying the book.

I have tried to avoid writ ing about the railways lately, but the other day there was chaos on our line because a train had broken down. When they finally cleared it, they started running trains non-stop in order to catch up with the timetable, leaving hundreds of people stranded all down the line. The really cunning bit was the way they only made the decision at the last minute, so you were stranded on the platform, expecting a train, which arrived blowing its hooter and whizzing through.

Naturally a long line of passengers queued for complaint forms. On mine I made the point that it wasn't only South West trains which had a schedule - their customers did too. And some had been waiting for an hour.

The reply ignored this point: "Sometimes it is necessary to run trains fast to recover the service ..." and refused me financial compensation for which I hadn't even asked. I think someone ought to take Pam Bradley, "customer relations officer" to one side, and tell her that there are some supposedly emollient letters which actually enrage the public even more.