Sucked in by £30bn porky pie black hole

REMEMBER those horrible half-width notebooks we were told to label “VOCABULARY” at school? How we loathed the interminable cycle of learning by heart and testing.

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Sundays were ruined by the need to write “surreptitious” “fascia” “fuchsia” and “desiccated” out a dozen times apiece to imprint both spelling and meaning in our brains forever.

Numb with boredom, I cursed under my breath — in forbidden Anglo-Saxon expletives — the cruel pedagogues who foisted such onerous toil upon me. Why did I need to clutter my eight-yearold brain with 11 synonyms for “hurry”? Wouldn’t the word “hurry” suffice?

Finally, I get it, I eat my mealymouthed words and belatedly thank my teachers for forcing me to become a human thesaurus. Six hours of live broadcasting on my LBC radio show put me squarely on my mettle.