YOU may be surprised to learn, if you had the chance to take a peek at my bank account, that I once worked in the City.

Every day I took the Central Line from Notting Hill to Chancery Lane and every lunchtime I strolled past St Paul’s Cathedral en route to a cheese toastie with optional coleslaw. Sometimes I even ventured inside. What better way to spend a rainy half-hour than tomb-spotting. In those far off days, of course, it cost nothing to enter St Paul’s. No more.

Perhaps the most interesting nugget to emerge from the Carry On Camping saga is that it costs £29.50 for two adults to enter God’s pad. You can understand, therefore, that for every day it is closed to the public a lot of money is not pouring into the Church of England’s rapacious coffers.

This is not the case in foreign parts. Take Italia, for example, where they’re so keen to get heathens into churches they virtually push them in. The only charge is to light a candle. Here, one suspects, the C of E is going the way of the abominable Ryanair and will soon be charging for wine, wafers and the use of hymnaries. Goodness only knows what they’d charge for confession.

MAD Boris Johnsonovsky, Mayor of Shoreditch, says “we” must not allow the Scottish tail to wag the British pitbull. Mr Johnsonovsky is upset because he surmises that Posh Dave and his chums are reneging on their support to have British Summer Time “in force” throughout the year, apparently because it might upset Us.

In so chuntering, Mr Johnsonovsky gives a remarkable insight into the character of the English. Were they to have an extra hour of daylight, he says, they wouldn’t feel the need to go and get drunk at 3pm. This is all Our fault, it seems.

“If the Scots really want to stay in bed for an extra hour while the rest of us are up and about, then that is their lookout. Let Salmond and co stick to their crepuscular timetable.” I don’t know about you but I can’t help thinking that when someone resorts to using words like “crepuscular”, he must be a tube.

AWAKE in the wee sma’ hours, I switched on the wireless hoping to be lulled back to sleep with a bedtime story. Instead, on Radio 4, I got a woman dressed, one imagines, in a leotard (dread garment), and blessed with the kind of voice usually reserved for satnav, giving an exercise lesson.

“Now bend your right knee,” she said. “Twist it gently, first to the left, then to the right. Now do the same with your left knee. Shake your head, but not too vigorously, otherwise it might become detached from your body. What are your ankles doing? Nothing? Well, rotate them in a clockwise direction, as you would a wheel. What do you mean you never rotate a wheel? Puff out your chest and breathe as if you mean it. Feel the air filling your lungs, feel bits of yourself that you’d forgotten you have come alive. Good, good.” On and on she went, until I reached out – awake, exhausted, raging – and turned her off.

BEWARE of Greeks bearing gifts. So Frau Merkel and Monsewer Sarkozy should have been warned. Who would be prime minister of the Greeks? As I scrieve, George Papandreou is hanging on to office by a vine leaf. Were I he, which admittedly would be difficult, I’d let go.

Has he read, one wonders, John Buchan’s Thirty-Nine Steps in which – I’m sure I do not need to remind readers of this throbbing organ – Richard Hannay must save from assassination the Greek Prime Minister Karolides or all hell will break loose? How spooky is that? By the by, would we be so keen on The Thirty-Nine Steps if there were only 38? I only ask because I can.

NOW then, now then, now then ... So faretheeweel Sir Jimbo Savile, the hermit of Glen Coe. According to his obits, Sir Jimbo was the nearest we’ve had to a secular saint. Nearer even than Bonnie Prince Chump, heir to the thunderbox.

Sir Jimbo raised millions for charity, working selflessly in hospitals where he didn’t mind getting his hands dirty, and added much gaiety to a miserable nation. Yet rumours about him persisted, mainly circulated by hacks of the nod-and-a-wink school, concerning him and young girls. When eventually he was asked about them, Sir Jimbo said “now then, now then, now then ...”

Shellsuits and cigars were what made his mojo motor. Sex was what you put tatties in. “I don’t have a girlfriend,” he once said, “because it’s not fair, the same as I don’t have plants because I’d never be back to water them.”

Among his proudest possessions was what one interviewer described as “a huge, staggeringly ugly silver-gilt trophy”, which he was given by the British Jewellery Association as the Male Jewellery Wearer of the Year.

What his obits underplayed, however, was his genius as a disc jockey. For him, the Queen may have been the Queen but the King was forever Elvis. How come, then, when he had to decide which record he would take to his desert island, he chose Elgar’s No 1 novelty hit Pomp And Circumstance instead of It’s Now Or Never? Well then, well then, well then ...

BAWHEIDED Donald Chump, who has more money than sense, says of a development in the northeast of Teuchterdom that it is “disastrous and environmentally irresponsible” and that it will leave “an ugly cloud hanging over the future of the great Scottish coastline”. He is not, I hasten to add, referring to his toupee. Nor is he talking about his ghastly golf resort which one environmentally sound columnist – me – has described as an excrescence.

What he is talking about is a planned offshore wind farm which appears to have been designed to put golfers off their stroke. Normally, I am against wind farms as a matter of course. In this case I am prepared to make an exception.

Henceforth nudists in San Francisco, where hitherto everything was allowed to hang out, have been told that when in restaurants they must place something between them and their seats. To which militant nudists have a one-word riposte: pants!

Crepuscular Scotland is refusing to answer Boris Johnson’s calls

Alas Sir Jimmy Savile has been returned to his sender