Am I as common as Lauren Sánchez? If so, where does that leave me?

Still, on my own sojourns to Italy, engulfed in all that beauty, history and mystery, I’ve also ended up feeling common as muck: from the lagoons of Venice to the palazzos of Rome, to the duomos of Milan, you name it, I’ve felt vulgar, blowsy and tacky in it.

Reading of the recent fracas in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence – a selfie-taking tourist damaged an artwork – I was guiltily reminded of my own determined iPhone prodding in that very venue to get a shot of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Last year, Venice, a prime “overtourism” hotspot, started charging a day-tripper entry fee – maybe in the hope that vulgarians like myself and the Bezos-Sánchezs can’t afford it and stay away.

My London manor, SW19, should imminently be heaving with visitors to the Wimbledon tennis tournament, clogging up public transport and gawping at shop windows festooned with wacky tennis ball displays.

Marks & Spencer has cannily got in on the act by launching a nationwide, limited-edition red diamond “Wimbledon sandwich”: a strawberries and cream “dessert sandwich” inspired by Japanese sweet sandos (a type of fruit snack). It sounded so terrifying, as a resident Womble, I felt it my civic duty to do a taste-test.

If you’re interested, get along to M&S early – the red diamond (£2.80; 10g of sugar a pack) is extremely popular (translation: Instagrammable). There’s only one triangle in the carton, but it’s very thick, fashioned of cottony brioche and strawberries studded in a stiff gunk of cream cheese and crème fraiche. To me, it felt like munching through a sweetened house-brick, but a woman I spoke to in the self-pay queue had bought a few and she loved them. Advantage, M&S.

With director Joseph Kosinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer on board, the new Brad Pitt film, F1, sounds like Top Gun with hubcaps. Though some think it would never have been funded so lavishly (an estimated £200m) without the phenomenal success of Netflix docuseries Formula 1: Drive to Survive. That sounds right: seven series in, zooming in on the big beasts and backroom dramas of the motor-sport, Drive to Survive serves as a thrilling, addictive advert for F1. But one overlooked factor could be lockdown: it was during the pandemic that Chez Ellen discovered it, morphing from total indifference (“Yawn, boo, elitist brum-brum racing”) to obsessed devotees in the time it takes for Ferrari to slam on a new set of tyres during a pit-stop. Drive to Survive would always have delighted F1 aficionados but, arguably, lockdown isolation – and ensuing binge-watching – helped lure in some newbies.

Photograph by Stefano Rellandini/AP, Getty