Task -- a gruelling walk to the Post Office at Finsbury Park to send off a bunch of scripts to an agent and a video to my friends Kip and Faiga (who are running the first Delhi International Film Festival in Delhi, upper New York State -- and the best of luck to them). To be followed by...

Reward -- lunch in the shape of falafel in a bread wrap, Saudi-bottled pure mango juice, a couple of pistachio cakes and an espresso-sized cup of the most powerful coffee to be had north of the 20th parallel, a refreshment so startling it jolts the spine to attention and sets the cardiac area whirring like a hysterical dynamo. This at the most exciting culinary discovery I've made in a while -- a newish Algerian coffee shop at the top end of the Blackstock Road. I can't remember its name. I don't think it has one.

Unexpected Bonus -- the skip (dumpster in Ameringlish) outside 32 Finsbury Park Road. Ambling along with vague thoughts that the pavement I was walking on -- original York stone -- had so far, and inexplicably, avoided the attentions of the freelance pavement burglars that work the area, a newspaper fluttered towards me -- the sort that usually has faecal material of recent human origin attached to it. But this one looked different, older, yellower, and with a banner headline involving Aneurin Bevin. Hang on. Aneurin Bevin? The Labour Party legend who died in the Fifties? I picked up a fragment of a piece of a Daily Express dated April 2, 1952.

And there was a skip nearby. Okay. Old habits die hard. Richer we may be, and gone are the days when the contents of a skip would furnish your entire north London squat with Turkish carpets, Louis XV escritoires, button-backed leather armchairs, chandeliers and pine tables, but I still can't pass a skip without casting half an eye over it. This one had the usual builders stuff, but confettied over it -- I couldn't believe my luck -- were old, sodden newspapers.

At this point you need to know that my wife was born on April 1st 1952, which disclosure, within the context of this despatch, will not I hope embarrass her. For the last week she's been visiting her highly-strung Aunt Phoebe in Granada, leaving me (it's been a bit of a struggle) to cook for the kids and get them off to school in the morning. So I haven't seen her since she turned 49, and nor have I found her a birthday present.

I need look no further. I hope she likes it. I do. As I write, it's drying downstairs. Yup. From the grey decade -- a complete, large-format broadsheet Daily Express with a 32 in pencil on it, suggesting delivery on the morning, probably before 8.00am, of April 1 1952 to 32 Finsbury Park Road, London N4, where it lay undisturbed, probably under floorboards, until builders threw it out on April 2nd or 3rd 2001.

The kitchen is now festooned with old, drying newspapers, all of which demand that I pore over them and report back to you. One headline has already caught my eye: Downfall Of A Dope-Party Girl. What? Dope-Party? Dull old England, 1952? Stand by for a radical Fifties rethink.