Coming next month to a courtroom near you: a bewildered young man, freshly convicted, trembles in the dock while awaiting his fate. But just before sentencing, a weeping widow stands, turns welling blue eyes to the bench and beseeches His Honour: ‘I cannot forgive him for his part in my husband’s death. My life is ruined. I beg you to punish him to the maximum.’ Murmurs of assent are shushed in the public gallery. ‘Well,’ says the judge, ‘I had planned leniency, in light of the coercion from older bullies and his mental age of six.

‘Buy on the bullets’ is the cry of the most ruthless stockbrokers — invest just before a war, after the stock markets dive, before the recovery kicks in. In the same way, now is the time for us heartless continental drivers to head for poor, battered Greece. Maybe it’s not quite war-torn yet, but driving around the Peloponnese this autumn was like touring a post-apocalyptic ghost town. Once you get out of the sun-bleached concrete sprawl of Athens, the splendid motorway to Kalamata is eerily empty at all hours of the day.

‘On the shore of desolate waves / he stood, full of lofty thoughts / and gazed afar.’ So begins Pushkin’s epic poem ‘The Bronze Horseman’, with the legend of Peter the Great founding his new city in 1703. A remote and inhospitable swampland in north-western Russia was transformed into his ‘window on the West’, a Baroque and neo-classical masterpiece. I came to St Petersburg to learn Russian. Enrolled for an intensive course at a private language school, I opted for full immersion and stayed with a local family for the two weeks.

George Galloway is unhappy. One of his interlocutors on Twitter has told him to ‘Fuck off back to England’. Gorgeous George is in Glasgow for the first in a series of roadshows in which he sets out his case for Scotland remaining part of the Union and he’s not going anywhere. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Not even to England. This will disappoint his many critics. But Galloway has a new, higher calling: saving whatever remains of the British left.

‘I remember you from last time,’ said the young man on the promenade. It was my first night back in Tangier. I was alone and tired and lonely. I liked the idea of meeting someone who knew me, if only from a brief encounter a few years before. ‘Yes, of course,’ I said, though I didn’t recognise him. In his cheap suit he seemed anonymous, like a policeman in plain clothes. It was nearly midnight, but the esplanade was still crowded.

Deep below West 52nd Street is a massive stash of booze. The cops never found it during Prohibition, and it belongs to the 21 Club. Famous for its sumptuously New Yorky dishes (like filet mignon with kumquat vinaigrette), 21 is a real boys’ den. Dark and plush, the subterranean rooms are festooned with intriguing junk: footballs, helmets, a model torpedo boat given by JFK, and a smashed racket from McEnroe. There are even 25 paintings by Remington, left by debtors during the depression.