I do enjoy writing these pieces and am truly grateful for your feedback. And I'm overwhelmed by the millions of you who choose, week in week out, to ignore my incisive, some may say unique combination of political analysis and knob gags.
I like to think that you won't have read the opinions you find in my pieces anywhere else, but sometimes I can't help wondering if I'm just another opinionated mouthy show-off who likes the sound of his own voice, or at least its screen equivalent, merely adding to the incessant cacophony of Twitter, Facebook and Huffington Post bloggers by confirming our shared prejudices.
On Tuesday these prejudices were challenged by two unusual experiences. In the morning I attended the launch of London Citizens' Inquiry into the Tottenham riots. And then in the evening I watched Newsnight.
I live in Haringey, where the riots began, but my home is on the other side of the railway track. The posh bit. With Highgate at one end and Edmonton at the other, Haringey is not surprisingly the borough with the greatest discrepancy between rich and poor in the country. Tottenham is nearer to me than the West End, but might as well be on another planet.
During my two minute walk from Seven Sisters tube to Tottenham Town Hall, I saw two policemen to my left and a burned out, boarded-up relic of the riots to my right. I tensed up, wondering if my patented 'white middle-class Jew' look might appear out of place in Haringey's Poverty Central. During that short walk I was certain at least three people looked at me in a funny way, and not one of them was a policeman.
By the time I left, my view of Tottenham had been transformed. A bunch of local people - vicars, imams, teachers, youth workers, shopkeepers and not a politician in sight - had produced a brilliant report, which is harsh about the past but concentrates mainly on the future, and rebuilding Tottenham. As one speaker put it, they will succeed because the report is too intelligent to fail.
Meanwhile excitement online had been growing about the fact that Jeremy Paxman would be interviewing Katie Price on Newsnight. And I thought aha! I can write that piece I've been meaning to do for ages about how embarrassing and lazy Paxman has become, and how when he's not bantering with his male mates in that horrible Westminster-ese that most normal people don't understand, he's making an idiot of himself in front of some tabloid celebrity, or introducing one of those desperate Newsnight pieces attempting humour that makes the Chuckle Brothers seem hilarious.
And now here was a subject, breast implants, that you couldn't guarantee would survive the smirking-public-school-boys-together treatment which has recently become Newsnight's default position.
In the end it was a remarkable piece of television, with Katie Price, Naomi Wolf, Health Minister Anne Milton and 13 eloquent women wanting to know what the hell was happening about their breast implants. All the facts were presented clearly (another area where Newsnight has become increasingly hazy) and the debate was lively and sometimes angry, but never allowed to swerve too far from the main issues.
If I had thought about it at all, I'd always followed the wishy-washy pinko liberal line that women shouldn't get breast implants, and if only we could end the rampant misogyny of everyday life they wouldn't feel the need to have them. Then I'd pat myself on the back for being such a smug superior male feminist.
Hearing these women talk about their reasons for having implants, and what they are now being put through was a real education, and for the second time in a day my gut prejudices were challenged and defeated.
But possibly the biggest challenge to my prejudices came because for months I had more or less accepted that Paxman had given up on Newsnight, and was coasting towards retirement. His interviews have become almost too painful to watch. This gathering should have been Paxman's worst nightmare, he's usually at his most uncomfortable around ordinary people (there were 13 of them), feminists, celebrities and above all, women.
Yet there he was, the lone male in the room, chairing the impassioned debate brilliantly. You could actually see Paxman working really hard, performing like the proper journalist he knows he can be. Perhaps, like me, his eyes had been opened earlier in the day when he realised that people who aren't politicians can talk just as eloquently when they feel passionate about something.
At one point, Paxman even said: "if everyone's talking at once, we can't hear anybody". Marvellous. I hope someone who works on the show prints that up as a 144pt headline and sticks it over his desk.