I may be free from the shackles of book group and its monthly reading impositions but I am not free of the lure of the bookshop. There was a big pile of This Bridge No Hands Shall Cleave on the front table – and one in the window, too. Someone must have made an ordering error. Oh dear!

In a new spirit of economy, I was modest with my purchases: Bramwell Price’s Spunk, Clive James’ Unreliable Memoirs, Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, Joe Wicks’ Lean in 15, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Travelling to the US on a Shoestring.

Monday November 12th

I was reading some Tolkien when my phone sounded. I picked it up after just the one ring. It was DI Lansbury.

‘Acrostics,’ he said.

‘What about them?’

‘Write them much, do you, sir?’

‘From time to time. Why?’

‘We’ve had another look at your diary. And Sergeant Tuck here noticed your entry for 5th September is an acrostic. I must admit that I didn’t know what an acrostic was but Sergeant Tuck informs me that it’s a type of poem in which the first letters of every line spell out a word or phrase.’

‘Sergeant Tuck is correct,’ I sighed. ‘What does it say?’

‘Well, that’s the interesting bit, sir. It reads T-O-B-Y S-A-L-T M-U-S-T D-I-E.’

‘Does it? I had no idea. What a coincidence!’

‘Extraordinary, isn’t it? I mean, the odds of the letters forming unintentionally in that way must be, what, a hundred million to one?’

‘Yes, quite large, anyway.’

‘Do you enjoy word games, Mr Bilston?’

‘I suppose so, yes.’

‘Well, here’s one for you to crack today. Rearrange the following words to make a sentence: Watching. We. Closely. You. Are.’

‘Mmm . . . you closely are watching we?’

He hung up.

Tuesday November 13th

It is practically mid-November and there are Christmas songs on the radio. Even the cat was disturbed enough to make one of her rare excursions into the garden.

I stayed in the warm and delved further into the murky past of Bramwell Price. The man’s got previous: a brawl with an audience member at a literary festival; a charge for assault on a waiter at a central London restaurant; and, most alarming of all, a restraining order placed on him concerning his first wife after he was found to be posting deposits ‘of a sexual nature’ through her letter box, following their estrangement. Not the kind of poet content to settle a score merely by writing some mildly scabrous remarks and cryptically hiding them within an acrostic.

Wednesday November 14th

To the Forty-Three

Oh, my poor and helpless herd,

waiting on my every word,

through all these pointless weeks

without the comfort of my tweets.

Use this time to make a plan.

Get some sleep in while you can.

Read a book. Or climb a tree.

Don’t put your life on hold for me.

Easier said than done, I know.