I have friends you would describe as middle-aged (although few people I know under 50 will accept that term, and none of 38) who, at a party, will alternate their intake of alcoholic drinks with softer options. These are the sort of recommendations made by health watchdogs and are, no doubt, very sensible. A glass of wine, a beaker of water, one on, one off, one on, one off. I believe there are no shortcuts to this system and am fairly sure spirit and mixer combinations, in the same glass, don’t count. Though I don’t adopt this strategy myself, I feel a small connection with these types, because between each new novel I’ve read recently I can’t help noticing I’ve straightaway reread Herzog by Saul Bellow. In fact, every time I pick up a novel to read, I remind myself that I could be reading Herzog again, and that it’s rather unlikely the book I am about to read will be anything like as good. The funny thing is that Herzog isn’t even my favourite novel by Saul Bellow – that’s More Die of Heartbreak – but Herzog always seems to be at hand, his vast, ogreish sensitivity a constant and pleasing foil to my own, always waiting for me on the bedside table.

I’ve had Herzog on the brain of late because, like that anxious hero, I keep picking up a pen to write letters to strangers: to the newspapers, to the manufacturers of disappointing packaged goods, to sympathetic-seeming public figures, or awful or unlawful ones, to the people in charge of parks and playgrounds and boating lakes where the services aren’t quite up to scratch (“You closed 15 minutes early! Children wept!”), to the authors of books I admire, to the manager of the Camden branch of Marks and Spencer, where the staff are so kind that it’s genuinely moving, to Miuccia Prada for creating such beautiful and serious-minded, navy-and-fawn-coloured Swiss lace dresses, if dresses can be serious-minded, that is.