We thought his column had ended but Clive, like Frank Sinatra, can’t resist one more comeback. Here he reflects on M&S puddings, The Wire and getting Wittgenstein wrong

ILLUSTRATION BY ANDRÉ CARRILHO

How is it possible that Marks & Spencer, with whom I have shopped for almost my entire adult life, has managed to fall out of the FTSE 100? When I was still mobile, I was in and out of its store here in Cambridge all the time. Now that I can’t physically get downtown to visit the actual shop any more, I have spies and agents who drop in to re-stock me with my favourite dessert: the M&S Individual Bread and Butter Pudding.

It seems that you or your factotums can purchase only a certain number of these little tubs of deliciousness before the latest palette-load of them is exhausted. You could say that the problem thus presented would be less acute if you were ready to settle for an arrangement of parcelling less miniaturised than “individual,” but you would be overlooking the late Victoria Wood’s observation that the word “individual” is, in itself, delicious: the very key-note of the forthcoming symphonic blow-out. (In her case, the focus of desire might have been on the M&S Individual Spotted Dick, rather than on the Individual Bread and Butter Pudding: but anyway it was in that ball-park, as it were.) One of the qualities that made her a great comic writer was that she could taste words. She could burst joy’s grape against her palate fine. And yes, she would have noticed that I managed to get both “palette” and “palate” into the same flight of sonic fancy. There was very little that she didn’t notice, in fact.