This afternoon I'm ambling home from an appointment with the Singing Christians of Kingsway and I'm accosted not far from my gate by a young whippersnapper in mauve pantaloons and holding a clipboard and modern recording device.
'Sir,' he says, thrusting a mic towards me, 'Do you think The Guardian is the greatest threat to world peace today?'
Me: 'Well, no. I do have my quarrels with the paper, but it isn't the greatest threat to world peace.'
Him (disappointed): 'Oh...'
Not being the nosy sort, I thought I'd hang around a bit anyway to see if he was putting the same question to others, so I crouched behind my gatepost in a way that rendered me altogether invisible to the passing throng, and the thronging thring, and I waited. Sure enough...
'Sir, do you think The Guardian is the greatest threat to world peace today?'
'Sir? But I'm a woman.'
'Sorry. Miss...'
'Please. Call me Madam.'
'OK, Madam. Do you think The Guardian is the greatest threat to world peace today?'
'Yes.'
Well, do you know, I couldn't believe my ears. The Guardian? Fruit juice, muesli, sandals and all those nice heart-warming pieces in G2 notwithstanding? And there were three more answers of yes before the next no. One of the young interviewer's respondents tore the clipboard from his grasp and smashed him across the cheek with it, crying 'Whipper... snapper... pantaloons!'
I don't need to tell you how surprised I was at that. I nearly remonstrated, but then remembered the old saying 'If you crouch behind a gate, do not try to remonstrate.'
Next up was a ferocious-looking guy with a huge spike through his nose and a tattoo across his forehead reading 'a book'. (It was the tattoo, you understand, that read 'a book', and not the ferocious-looking guy. Otherwise, why would I have used the inverted commas?) Asked the same question as the others, he said, 'No, Liverpool Football Club. Threat to world peace. Threat to the survival of the species. General public nuisance.'
Other answers I heard were 'Osama bin Laden' (three times), 'George Bush' (twice), 'The Stoke of Poges' (once) and 'Yes, The Guardian - definitely' (eight or nine times - my uncertainty over the precise figure being due to the fact that one of the nine was eating a sandwich and she may have been saying 'The Daily Telegraph - preferably'; I just couldn't be sure).
The most surprising, and most frequent, answer I heard, Dear Readers (and this you may find difficult to believe), was a variant of the following: 'No, not The Guardian. The greatest threat to world peace today is Madeleine Bunting.'
Not Our Madeleine of the Sorrows, surely? Well, that's what they all said, those of them that said it. I got up from where I was crouching behind the gatepost, and staggered, amazed, into the house.