I dropped Julia at work this morning then went to the jewellers.

We didn’t talk about jewellery much, but we did set the world to rights and form the idea for a new TV programme.

The programme will take place in two shops in Nottingham and feature two groups of miserable old men sitting round moaning about how things used to be better. We already have one shop with three miserable old sods (even though one is quite young, he moans with the best of us) and have another shop and group of old gits in mind for the second one. We’re going to pitch it to a successful producer we know and see what happens.

People like antiques, reality shows and grumpy old men so I think it has legs as an idea. Personally, I’ll be looking for some advertising and a book spin-off. If Scarlett Moffatt can do it I’m sure I can, though, looking at her profile, I may need a new middle name. Karloff seems good. It has the right ring to it and you can see why William Henry Pratt adopted it as a stage name.

We were talking of the things that used to worry us, like Russia invading Afghanistan. Do you remember that – we all thought how stupid they were for trying – it rarely ends well for the invader.

Now we worry about recycling and financing kids through college.

We also spoke of the good old days and a local dealer who just bought a forgery of a rare coin, losing £2,000 on the deal. It was offered to him, gleaming and uncirculated, in the middle of a parcel of average worn coins. There’s a place where enthusiasm for coins, and the love of profit muffles the alarm bells that should be ringing.

How, he should have asked, did such a remarkably well-preserved coin end up in a batch of worn silver? It takes remarkably little wear to downgrade a coin in the eyes of a collector. Terms such as bag marks and cabinet wear are used to denote the sort of damage that can be done to a coin even before it is circulated. Bag marks are the marks that occur during manufacture and packing into bags. Cabinet wear is the light scuffing that occurs when a coin moves in a cabinet as you open and close the drawers. That is how fussy they are.

Anyway, he didn’t ask, he paid the money, and he can’t get the seller on the phone number he supplied, which gives me an idea for the next TV programme – CSI Coin Shop.

Stranger things have caught on…