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Well, you live and learn. I thought there was absolutely nothing in the world that could even begin to focus my attention on the sickeningly corrupt, obscenely expensive corporate love-in boreathon that is the Olympics. But director Danny Boyle managed it by constructing an extraordinary opening ceremony.

Not that I watched it, you understand: the cost of the thing was so vast that I wouldn’t have been able to stomach it. But I gather from the outside world that what Boyle achieved was a truly remarkable thing – a universally admired, quirkily unhinged celebration of Britishness that really got up the noses of the likes of David Cameron, Lord Coe and a few Neanderthal Tories.

Fair enough, he had the money to do it, but fair play to the man. Celebrating the Britishness I love, I gather: fairness, friendship, decency. And not getting somebody famous to light the flame was a coup, too. I may even watch the ceremony now, because we recorded it for the children – though obviously Paul McCartney, who now looks like a squirrel with its nuts caught in a bird feeder, would be a step too far.

It seems I’m with the writer David Quantick, who neatly tweeted “I am made of hate, but this is a wonderful event.”

To criticise the money spent on this advertising exercise is to be a miseryguts, according to many. But when, like me, you’re made of hate and it’s part Scottish hate, it’s hard to get away from money.

Have a glance, for example, at the campaign group US Uncut’s arguments about the richest 0.1% of people and the wealth they maintain in tax havens; enough, allegedly, to pay off the national debts of the US and Europe. Now tell me it’s wrong to focus on money!

Anyway, hate-filled misery that I am, it’s off to the Olympics for me this week. Organisers, in their great generosity and in the spirit of the event, gave away a bunch of tickets to schoolchildren, you see, and we have some. Great that, isn’t it? What the Olympics are all about… enabling free and equal access for all to great sport, passing on the good news to the next generation.

What are our tickets for?

Oh, the football. The women’s football. The women’s football in Cardiff.

You didn’t think the organisers would be sharing the Olympic spirit of any of the big events, the events for which they could flog £900 tickets, with pesky children, did you? Or handing out tickets for any of the empty seats assigned to sponsors and federations?

Not that I’ve got anything against women’s football, you understand. 25,000 were at the first women’s game, and I think that’s brilliant.

Now then, if it ain’t money, it’s sex…

Still the world’s talking about 50 Shades of Grey. Can I signpost you, then, to two highlights of the ongoing cultural debate…

One, Victoria Coren’s brilliant piece in Sunday’s Observer, which very neatly deconstructs the erotic charge of a novel in which the romantic lead has apparently given his penis a name. Coren writes: “…let’s examine what Christian says as he stands there, wanger in hand: ‘I want you to become well acquainted, on first name terms if you will, with my favourite and most cherished part of my body’,” which, as she says, makes him sound more like Alan Partridge than a pagan love god. The article’s here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/29/victoria-coren-fifty-shades-of-grey

And the other is to follow the mysterious 50 Sheds of Grey on Twitter: “ ‘Are you sure you can take the pain?’, she demanded, brandishing her new stilettos. ‘Yes’, I gulped. ‘OK’, she said, and showed me the receipt…” It’s brilliant.

Sex is one of the things that’s always with us, like the poor, or taxes. Or death.

The bastard with the black cloak and the scythe did his worst last week, as you all know by now, and there really aren’t words adequate to deal with the enormity of the sadness visited upon Mike’s loved ones. All is triteness and cliché; therefore we must once more turn to the great and godlike Cohen and trust that there truly is a crack in everything, even this, for that’s how the light gets in. Let there, one day, be light again.

“I know the stars

are wild as dust

and wait for no man’s discipline

but as they wheel

from sky to sky they rake

our lives with pins of light.”