Marco Pierre White has lumbered back onto our screens to promote Knorr Stock Pots. “K-norr darling, K-norr,” shouts K-aroline, who is still several campaigns behind and doesn’t realise Unilever has given up its futile attempts to get us to pronounce the brand in the Continental stylee. Anyway, back to the menacing Mr White, who is usually featured somewhere in these ads looking creepy and saying “delicious” in a sinister way.

It’s a sort of goth approach to stock in the face of safe, homely Oxo. The most surprising thing, though, is Marco’s revelation that Knorr Stock Pots are “made with real ingredients”. “Fictitious ingredients don’t exist, do they?” I ask Miranda, a bit confused. She says it makes her proud to be in PR to see entirely meaningless marketing-speak paraded on primetime TV and sounding like it means something good.

At least it is appearing on screen. Puff & Fluff’s ‘Party Like it’s Nitro Nitro Nine’ cocktail promotion, due to hit the streets for London Cocktail Week, was nixed by the FSA with its Monday morning warning. Meanwhile, our brewery client’s autumn offer with Waverley TBS - Beer Today, Gone Tomorrow - proved all too prescient. And to top it all came the news that the world’s supply of Scotch is tainted with sulphur.

Fortunately, by the time I get round to the whisky at the end of a long night out with a frozen food brand manager I’m too bored to notice off-flavours, or indeed any flavours at all. The numbing hit of pure alcohol is what’s needed to tune out of a monologue about innovation in the frozen aisle. Apparently I said: “Do you mean Greenland?” before I slumped, comatose, into his lap. We’ve kept that account, as it happens.