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it’s institutional sexism. If you said it, it would just be sexism – you haven’t got an institution, or not one that anyone cares about. Did you see Britain’s most senior Community Support Officer on the news last night?

CSO: No?

POLICEMAN: Neither did I.

I have no idea whether this is an accurate depiction of how policemen view CSOs. Actually, I have some idea. A year or so ago, I was standing in the street outside a party (it was a party to which I’d been invited, I hasten to add, and I was with a group of guests smoking outside; some people are surprised to hear that I cadge and smoke the odd cigarette when drunk; of those people a minority are disappointed; people like that need to invest their hopes with more care) when a couple of policemen came up and told me how much they’d enjoyed the sketch and said it was fair comment – so it obviously rang true for them. But I’m sure lots of police have a huge amount of respect for their CSO colleagues. Well, it’s possible.

The reason I have a problem believing that it’s a harmonious relationship of mutual respect is that I think that both jobs attract the same sort of people. People who are usually well-meaning and want to do good but also want to be in charge of things – they want the overt trapping of authority. In short, both policemen and CSOs are people who want to be policemen. And yet the CSOs aren’t. Why?

I’m convinced that almost all CSOs would prefer to be proper policemen – I expect there are about two weird contrarians who wouldn’t, like that heterosexual couple who campaigned to be allowed to have a civil partnership instead of a marriage in order to prove a point. But I think basically CSOs want to be in the proper police and aren’t allowed. If I have a certain amount of involuntary disdain for someone who tries to be a policeman and fails, how much more will be felt by an actual policeman? And I’m afraid to say, while I’m sure there are many noble and brilliant officers, one can’t read the newspapers and conclude that police recruitment procedures have excluded all incompetence and dishonesty from their ranks. And the CSOs still couldn’t get in?

But I know what it’s like to grasp at a tiny and despised amount of authority in order to try and feel better about yourself because, in the Sixth Form at Abingdon, I strove desperately to become a prefect. Looking back, I wish I hadn’t.

You know how some teenagers, often the arty creative ones, seem to have an attitude of immunity to the outside world – of poise and calm? I’m sure that’s not how they feel, or behave to their families, but it’s how they can come across. I have a sense that they’re often in bands – or maybe they paint or sculpt or something. They seem unselfconsciously artistic and above the usual teenage concerns of friendship and acceptance and dealing with authority.

Well that wasn’t me. But neither was I conventionally successful, cool or popular. I had no idea that parties were a thing that happened to people my age. I’d been to parties when I was six which involved jelly and Pass the Parcel; I later went to parties as a student which involved £3 bottles of wine and Stella cans full of cigarette ends; and I go to parties now which involve canapés and commissioning editors – but in my teens I was almost completely off the party grid. I went to two, I think. Both were cast parties for plays, at which I awkwardly hung around sipping cider, bored out of my mind and baffled, absolutely baffled, that this could be an environment that anyone would enjoy. And vaguely wondering how long I had to wait before an attractive girl would throw herself at me.

No, in my teens I fell squarely between the stools of conventional acceptance by my peers and arty indifference to such notions. I knew I couldn’t be a star of the former group but neither did I have a sufficient sense of self-worth to reject a value system that was rejecting me. I was into acting and debating and watching TV comedy – I could have styled myself as left-wing and creative and anti-establishmentarian. I wish