I once told a prospective employer that my ambition was to retire to the country and cultivate a reputation for mild eccentricity.

This was before I understood the rules of engagement at job interviews or realised that the people conducting them can be depressingly humourless.

It was also a mistake, therefore, to admit my wish to pursue private passions, which was merely another way of expressing the contemporary injunction to work to live, but also applicable to enjoying one's paid employment.

Many candidates are offered jobs after lying about both their abilities and any accomplishment impossible to verify before contracts are signed and glowing references are exposed as the mendacity of a friend or ex-colleague.

The interviewer in my opening paragraph did not possess the wit to ask me if wanting to ride a bicycle along country lanes while singing selections from light opera was compatible with a life of high vocational office beforehand.

But I would have had to disappoint her on that score as well, because the idea of ambition as a quality seems to me to be seriously flawed and the adjective, vaulting, that often accompanies it, with its image of someone flying over the bent backs of others, much more telling.

I could have been pricked by the suggestion that eccentricity can never be consciously cultivated, only slipped into without one's knowledge, like being oblivious to the balloon some joker has pinned to the seat of one's trousers.

It is also the province of the elderly (that's us). Young, so-called 'eccentrics' are simply flamboyant, and allying Graham Norton with TV racing tipster John McCririck is like comparing a peacock with a large owl.

Given the choice, though, I prefer my eccentrics to be public. The so-called 'world of comedy' once furnished them in multitudes. Most of today's stand-up comedians find difficulty in releasing the lavatory flush handle and look as though they've slept in clothes filched from a seedy thrift store.

Not in the same class, you must agree, as Spike Jones and His City Slickers, whose mauling of Rossini's William Tell overture (with commentary by one Doodles Weaver) and other untouchable classics is humour wrought in Bedlam.

Impenetrable zaniness is the best sort. I've spent years trying to de-code Groucho Marx's Hooray for Captain Spaulding (I'll do anything you say, I'll even stay, but I must be going), and anyone who thinks Fats Waller's Your Feet's Too Big refers to the appendages at the end of your legs has led a cloistered life.

Those are just examples from the Land of the Free. In Britain, what was Max Wall's Professor Wallofski about - a man in black tights, leather boots, an ill-fitting jacket and shoulder-length hair sitting at a pianoforte, under an umbrella as he prepared to play the Raindrop Prelude?

Then there was Arthur Askey (I'm a busy, busy bee) and Tommy Cooper, who keeps appearing in these columns as a necessary purgative (I told the doctor I felt like a pair of wigwams and he told me I was too tense).

Horace St John Kelly Donisthorpe was a British coleopterist so enthusiastic about observing beetles and ants that 24 of the thirty new species he claimed to have identified turned out to be bummers.

Still, a day in his company would have been more entertaining than listening to the assembled rhetoric of George Bush.

I don't know though...