Well, I'm very excited. I know doesn't excite you that much, but the letters are literally lolling in.

You mean emails?

Why do you have to correct me all the time?

Because people will be confused. They'll say, letters, should I be writing to them in long hand on centred note paper?

No, you must email us at no idea at the times.com. And you have been emailing us. They have in their thousands. I always call them letters because I'm quite old. And also letters are dead. I must mean emails, mustn't I? But the truth is email. And like pages and pages of questions, some really good questions which are going to address in our special kind of August. We're on holiday, but there's still a podcast for you podcast with questions. There's people, there's someone emailing from Alabama, Montgomery, Alabama, saying, hi, y'all. I think they're trying to claim they'll be the furthest listener, but they can't get close. East Jakarta. East Jakarta or potentially Sydney, maybe further away. We don't yet know. Lots of them, the subject lines,

how to market communists. I'm looking forward to reading that one. Potentially dangerous question,

asks Paul Gin, we'll come to it at some point. My prostate cancer diagnosis may be as

interesting as yours, at least they're reading. They're talking out of my ass, as it were,

again. Charity restaurant guide, Uniseth. Giles, apologies.

Why not? It's the right way. And I thought we could start, because this isn't the letters podcast. This is a topical news podcast. And the top one is from David, or it could be David D. But it's DAV-I-D-D-D-David at dinsdales.net. Hi, Giles. your column this week has just fallen into your lap.

An open letter of

job application to the job you've always coveted. That is spot on, David. Do you want a job?

That's brilliant. That is, he must, does he recall my, didn't they apply to be Prince Charles's

head gardener? You have done a series of job applications in the column, and definitely one of them was

head gardener at High Grove.

Perhaps, Charles, you'd like to trot out one of those crappy ones and go back to the cricket.

But at the top, it says BBC, scrambling for Master Chef replacement after John Thoreau sacking.

And David thinks I might like to apply to the job I've always coveted, to which I reply.

Good idea for column, but I haven't always covered it, have I?

No, the thing that you covet from television is something else entirely.

It's something a bit more amorphous. I did hope you would iron out with your psychotherapist, but... Well, I've gone off the idea of just fame, like general, just like fame. Well, we can get... I mean, we get around to that, because obviously I was sort of... The very first whiff I might ever do TV was when they called me, and we talked about to see what I like to present Master Chef. It's coming back. We've got John to Road. Would you like to present it? Go over screen test. No, we've gone with Greg Wallace. So I'm not going to apply for the job, because once I was turned down, I swore never to be on it. No. I think it's a crap show. I think it promotes the wrong kind of cooking. I think it

has done 20 years of serious damage to the British cuisine by foregrounding fiddly-twiddly nonsense

...