Those of you who followed the saga last week of my ailing car and its repeated failure to be towed back to Wycombe until the fourth patrolman of the apocalypse eventually turned up to undertake the task will perhaps be diverted to learn that those worthy gentlemen’s diagnoses were as lacking as their preparedness to tow. I could have driven the car home myself, it appears, and saved them all a lot of energy sucking air through their teeth, as the hideous knocking noise that prompted my calling for their services emanated not from the engine, as I and they had thought, but from the air conditioning unit. My mechanic was barely troubled for an hour before sending my quiet car humming through the lanes of Buckinghamshire again. Phew and ho hum!

And my week got even better when, in this 50th year of Doctor Who with its celebrations and postage stamps, yet another exciting opportunity came along, one that I could never have imagined possible when I was a young boy dreaming of being an actor. Next Monday I shall be attending my first sitting for award winning sculptor, Andrew Sinclair, at his Wendover studios, where he and his wife, Diane, run The Sculpture School. Andrew was the sculptor who recently helped refurbish the Royal Box at Ascot with a bas relief version of the royal coat of arms and he created the wonderful life-sized dinosaur, which was displayed at the Chelsea Flower Show ridden by a sculpted fat unclad lady.

He has kindly offered to make a bronze resin bust of your doddering columnist, which will be unveiled later in the year in time for the programme’s anniversary in November. He is also, over the same period, very generously creating a bust of another local person in the public eye, to be announced later. Sadly, my bust will be of me as I am now and not of the curly haired golden youth of the 80’s and will therefore be requiring poor Andrew to employ somewhat more of the old bronze resin in the creative process. But I am relieved that the head and shoulders nature of a bust will remove the possibility of my far from ripped anatomy being immortalised.

And I am really looking forward to being able to sit still for a while without feeling guilty about the many things I really ought to be doing.