This morning’s Observer column…

PG Wodehouse wrote the best evocation I’ve ever read of what it’s like to be totally astonished. He describes the expression on the face of a chap who ‘while picking daisies on the down line, has just received the 4.15 in the small of the back’. Well, I saw that expression this week. It crossed the visage of a friend who is a grizzled veteran of the print business, a man who was once deputy editor of one of our more disgraceful national newspapers. No more cynical observer of human depravity can therefore be imagined. But he was, for an instant, genuinely taken aback…