I once told the nation that it was quite fun when they tossed each other off. I was talking about stag beetles wrestling on a small podium

We all have days when it's frankly a relief to get home and go to bed. The sort of day when you're grateful you made it to the end. For me, it's a day on live television when everything I say is a double entendre and my brain has wandered off and is having a smoke with a furry friend.

Fiona Phillips mentioned, after my 8am bulletin on GMTV the other day, that she saw me getting on to the back of a motorbike the morning before.

"Yes," I began. Took a big breath and stopped. Because I had been about to say that there was nothing like the feeling of the wind whistling through your helmet.

I once told the nation that I thought it was quite fun when they tossed each other off. I was talking about stag beetles wrestling on a small podium.

I remember someone telling me that at TV-am, there was a competition going on to get certain words into the programme. The word of the day was clitoris.

A picture was shown of an interviewee in earlier times.

"What a fantastic picture," said the presenter. "Is it back-lit or is it the way you're sitting?"

I managed to get one of my favourite comedy words, stoat, into Shooting Stars, which I recorded last week. I wanted to slip in a biscuity bottom, but couldn't spot an opening.

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So I come back from holiday to discover a nation in thrall. Normally, these things bounce off me like fleas off a hedgehog. Who will win Big Brother? More importantly: is it the Calgon that is leaving blobs on my washing? Should I buy the Gina pink or silver sandals, and will I have a chance to wear them if global warming means we're just going to have long wet summers followed by long wet winters?

But against my will, I have been dragged into I'm A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here. On Saturday night, I even found my hand hovering over the phone to support Christine Hamilton after her struggle to retrieve the plastic boxes from the bottom of the river.

Let's not get into the issue of whether they're celebrities or not. They've appeared in national newspapers and we know them better than we know any James Joyce novels. But it takes me back to the biology lab at Rutland High School, when our off-syllabus experiments included seeing whether Jane Ratcliffe would flinch if we put locusts down her back.

In fact, it has been exactly like school. The bully type, the bully-off type, the mad one, the Dad one, the leery one and the lairy one. No wonder we're all obsessed - it's like catching up on your old classmates.

In 20 years' time, it'll be a bonding experience when, at a dinner party, you'll say: "Does anyone remember that programme about those celebrities in the jungle?" And you'll all try to remember their names and you'll phone up the host two weeks later and say: "Nell! That was the other one."

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A Dutch team of researchers has found that counselling after traumas can do more harm than good, I read in the newspaper. They discovered that those who had just got on with life as best they could, with the love and support of family and friends, were in far better shape than those who had been counselled by experts.

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On holiday recently, I read a brilliant book called Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut. It was a vision of the future where we've mutated into seals because we have destroyed the world, and the few of those who are left are living on an island in the Galapagos, where fish is virtually the only thing to eat. One of the catchphrases is "Thanks a lot, big brain" - used to point up how our cleverness has resulted in our phasing ourselves out.

It's funny how, no matter what age you are, being thought thick is always a bummer. This must be why the word clever has slightly pejorative overtones. Why clever clogs was not something to be proud of. Why the little boy from Nanjing in China who left school at the age of seven to pursue a writing career has been vilified as well as praised, according to an article in the Daily Telegraph.

He was apparently a lonely student who alienated his peers with arrogant assertions of his exceptional talents. One of his teachers said: "He used to go around saying: 'I am Dou Kou. I have written a book'."

I'm in Norfolk at the moment, staying with my friends Kit Hesketh-Harvey and Kate Rabett. Kit has a brain bigger than my body in winter. He probably could have written a book at the age of seven but just forgot. But I think I'd make a better seal.

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My dad used to call the bath his think-tank. A place he could get away from pink bell-bottoms and hamsters to work out engineering designs and knotty problems. My mother finds a nice walk does the trick.

I like a bit of noise. The noise without allowing the voice within to roam around. Particularly if the noise is music - preferably classical.

Last week, I was at the Proms with Mr Brahms and Mr Walton providing the canvas. I thought about the Spanish inquisition, Turkish carpets, English countryside and why no one has invented foldaway sandals for women who've worn impossible shoes all day. That last one was nothing to do with the music - just my Stephane Kelians being a bit too high.

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