“I love the absolute honesty of his diaries,” Jenkin enthuses. “He would casually massage the breasts of the maid who brushed his hair at night as though it were the most normal thing in the world It wasn’t exactly prostitution, but like some sort of game. It was the 17th-century equivalent of the casting-couch.”In working his way through the two-feet-high pile of diaries, Jenkin had to decode Pepys’ entries about his many dalliances because he “wrote them up in shorthand. Another old hand told me that an even older hand had advised him that having a few snifters or some recreational drugs was the way to make your sentences soar. During the day, you would discover that a famous historian’s daughter was taking your place next week because she was on half-term.

Often, like Oliver Twist, you would have to phone up to ask for your payments.It became clear that time was up. The younger generation didn’t want to read about aristocratic hairpieces, Captain Bird’s Eye beards and WI ladies reaching for the smelling-salts They wanted celebrities. So, it was with some surprise, when others and I were settled in more mundane and obscure employments, that a call came through to say that the Daily Mail was going to bring it back. But maybe the Daily Mail does have a hotline to Middle England, because for the first few weeks it worked well.I confess I was a bit rusty. I had forgotten how to address the toffs and phoned up the House of Lords and asked for Baron X. The former royal correspondent Robert Hardman overheard me and nearly passed out.

“It’s always ‘Lord’,” he sighed.Peterborough is actually the cutting edge of journalism. It is no coincidence that titans such as Auberon Waugh, Bill Deedes and Charles Moore began their careers there. Columnists have to employ sharp lateral thinking to fill the page each day. Whenever there was something like a town criers’ contest, it was our job to phone round the chemists to see if there was a run on throat lozenges. If Mr Putin was in town, had consumption of vodka gone up? We had to use great ingenuity to generate copy about Trafalgar Day, Empire Day, hot cross buns and Maundy money. And we identified the things that the readers really cared about: the demise of the steak-and-kidney pudding.However, it wasn’t long before I experienced diarist’s despair: sitting in front of a totally flat story, bereft of facts or jokes, with only two hours left before the column went to the subs A colleague on Dempster called it “polishing a turd”. Consumers have a new-found pricing power this Christmas and analysts are fretting that profit margins are under serious threat.
Hennes & Mauritz, Europe’s biggest clothing chain, set the tone for the day, announcing that sales growth had slumped to a three-year low of 4 per cent in November, compared with 14 per cent a year before, because consumers had stopped buying winter garments.Wal-Mart came next.

The US retailer, the world’s biggest, warned that December sales growth would be at the bottom end of expectations. “Let’s put it like this, Pepys led a very vivid life.He was very prolific with women I imagine he had a certain wit and charm about him. So just why was the diarist so successful at putting notches on his bed-post? Jenkin smiles. Taking a break from his steaming keyboard, he says that “the BBC is usually accused of adding lots of sex to its classic adaptations But if anything, we’ve had to take it out.