I am not worried about being outed as a recipient of Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’ hospitality. Yes, it is true that I did once pull an all-nighter at one of Mr Combs’ many luxurious homes. But I never saw any drug-enhanced debauchery, and apart from Hollywood has-been Bruce Willis, none of the other guests were what you’d call A-listers. The only thing we had in common, in fact, was that most of us were, like Mr Willis, conspicuously shiny of scalp. Which hardly came as a surprise, since this was not one of Mr Combs’s ironically titled White Parties, nor one of his now notorious Freak Offs, but one of his much less-well-publicised Comb Overs; the bottles we were handed on arrival containing not baby oil but hair tonic, the bowls on every table filled not with cocaine but volumiser. Since my own hairline was at the time merely receding, and my fame did not extend much beyond the readership of this magazine, I was frankly surprised to get a guernsey, and both relieved and disappointed to discover later that my invitation was a clerical error, a Combs staffer having confused me with my better known and more follicly challenged pommy homonym Phil Collins.

Combs, then, is far from your typical hip-hop heavyweight. Perhaps to atone for monetising the violence, misogyny and homophobia of black urban gang culture for much of his career, he has in recent years become a quiet ally of other marginalised minorities; balding crackers being one of them. To fill the education gaps left by a precocious admission to the university of hard knocks, he has also become a voracious reader and ardent Anglophile, only changing the stage name Puff Daddy to P. Diddy when advised that the word Puff might alienate older members of the UK’s LGBT community, and the word Daddy might trigger orphans. Keen to share the fruits of his new literacy, it was Combs who, having abbreviated himself to Diddy, advised rival West Coast rapper Snoop Doggie Dog to shorten his name to Snoop Dog, thereby eliminating a potentially career-limiting tautology.

Combs’ passion for nomenclature is not limited to the entertainment world. Amongst the witnesses at his trial will be Fema officials who will attest to his lobbying against the appending of harmless sounding girls’ and poets’ names to devastating weather events. Specifically, they will concede that evacuating areas threatened by hurricanes Helene and Milton might have been a lot easier if, as Combs had suggested, they had been named Motherf—ers 1 and 2. Nobody in Australia will pay closer attention to this part of the trial than the people in charge of our biggest renewal energy project. It is almost a year since one of the $75m drilling machines employed on Snowy 2.0 got stuck just 100 metres into the job. Conscious that the project’s initial $2 billion budget had been blown before the first sod was turned (current estimate is $12 billion), Snowy 2.0 management had taken the precaution of giving this machine a girl’s name, reasoning that if it did get trapped under a mountain for a year, calling it Florence might elicit public sympathy rather than taxpayer outrage. The equally expensive machine needed to free Florence has now been purchased, and Snowy 2.0 officials must give it a name that will discourage media commentary which includes words like ‘money’, ‘throwing’ ‘good’, ‘bad’ and ‘after’. Since it will essentially be on a rescue mission, conservatives have suggested that this new machine should have a man’s name, but this has been dismissed as unacceptably patriarchal and binary, and the smart money is currently on Molly  – as in Molly the Mole – Molly also being, serendipitously, the name of a non-binary Australian celebrity who knows a lot about rock. But there are fears that even the combined efforts of Mollies 1 and 2 may not succeed in dislodging poor Florence from the vice-like grip of Kosciuszko sandstone. In which case Snowy 2.0 management may be forced to resort to what is already being referred to as the Combs Solution: smearing her with thousands of litres of baby oil.