Sorry for not smoking crack or being a Black Panther

Do you know what would make this column better? If I was addicted to crack. Or a member of the Black Panther movement. Or the victim of violent spousal abuse.

For a writer who makes a living out of cataloguing the details of his everyday existence, the fact that I'm none of these things is just unprofessional. Lazy even. If I was serious about this job I'd have been cultivating that crack habit for years.

Then, instead of having to read about me accidentally toasting the baby's hand in the George Foreman grill or dropping drain cleaner on the cat or whatever the hell it is I've been filling this column with for the past three-and-a-half years, you could have read stuff that was genuinely thrilling.

My increasingly mundane existence is only able to sustain about 180 columns

I might have been able to tell you a story about smoking cocaine through a hollowed out plastic effigy of Iggle Piggle from In The Night Garden. Well, I'm sorry about that.

As it turns out, my increasingly mundane existence is only able to sustain about 180 columns. What you are reading now is Newish Man's final death rattle. Arrrrrggghhhh.

The good news is that anyone who has found this catalogue of navel-gazing old toss mildly distracting will soon be able to buy a whole book of the stuff.

A distinguished but probably shortsighted publishing company has asked me to write a book chock-full of the sort of self-regarding flim-flam, puerile humour and ill-thought-out diatribes that I like to think have become my trademark.

It's called Nights of the Living Dad and will be published next summer by John Murray. Buy one when it comes out. In fact, buy two: one to read, one to eat!

If you want to get in touch with Sam, he can be reached at: sam@sixtybillion.com