Acouple of weeks ago I bumped into a man I used to work with. We chatted for a bit about people we knew in journalism, and I volunteered that so-and-so had just left his wife and was now shacked up with one of his underlings. My ex-colleague pursed his lips. I don’t do gossip, he said.

For about two seconds I felt ashamed of myself, but then I felt cross with him instead. What a prig. How can you be a former journalist and not do gossip?

Gossip has a bad name. The Oxford dictionary defines it disdainfully as “unconstrained conversation . . . about other people, typically involving details which are not confirmed as true”. Yet it has always struck me as one of those rare guilty pleasures where pleasure outweighs guilt. The damage done to the subject of the gossip is generally negligible, while the fun and fellow feeling created between the chatterers is considerable.