Every desk requires a desk encyclopedia and for several years mine held the admirable Concise Columbia Encyclopedia (Columbia University Press). My old copy was getting tattered from overuse, the covers torn, the pages fraying at the corners, so I asked for a new one. My son obliged me with the Third Edition.

On Boxing Day I took it for a test run and it passed with flying colours, providing me with the rules of rummy, the correct spelling of Zbigniew Brzezinski and an explanation for the strange behaviour of Norwegian lemmings.