It has black spots on the leaves, and white mildew on its wood. My father-in-law Bob, who has forgotten more about gardening than I will ever know, seems to think that it has the plant equivalent of bubonic plague, that it should be dug up forthwith and buried deep in the ground by men wearing protective clothing. Otherwise, he says, the spores will spread.But I have not followed this advice. And not only was it not there, there was no sign that it ever had been there.

I felt like the character in the Edgar Allen Poe story, who cannot find any traces of her former life. I wondered whether Jane might be trying to get me to doubt my sanity, so that I would be carted off to the asylum and she could marry the milkman But she was as mystified as I was Obviously, the thing had been pinched. By whom, we never discovered.Anyway, all that is by way of an introduction to the jasmine. Please do something about it.You will note that I am writing you a letter to complain about this.

It will be delivered to you personally in a day or two by a uniformed operative of the Royal Mail. You can throw it away after you have read it if you like.See if I care
More from Miles Kington. We have, in our conservatory, a jasmine given to us as a house-warming present by our good friends Dominic and Linda. They also gave us a magnolia tree, which, as regular readers will recall, ended up at the heart of a mystery. For months I devotedly nurtured it – watered it, fed it, discussed Coronation Street storylines with it, and generally treated it like a member of the family. In return, it thrived.
Then, one day about a year ago, I got home from a trip abroad, and having embraced the wife, the children and the dog – I hope in that order – strode over to say hello to the magnolia But it wasn’t there. Even while blubbing to myself and anyone who would listen that it was unfair to penalise an author for the way a publisher has promoted his book, I realised not only that I sympathised with the enraged reviewer but that I was on shaky moral ground.From the moment that I had agreed, some years ago, to help publicise my first novel by posing with a chicken on my head for a “Me and my pets” column in a Sunday newspaper, I lost the right to disapprove of the way my books were sold.”It shows in the writing in the end – it has to,” Zadie Smith has commented during a recent discussion about how authors are expected to play the part of cheerful self-marketers And there is the big, uncomfortable question.