“WOULD sir like to try the fragrance?” said the gentleman in black leggings, hovering over me, at the eau de toilette counter in Selfridges.

“Umm, well,” I said as he grasped my hand and sprayed me with a silver bottle of something smelly.

“Special, isn’t it?” he said.

Especially expensive, especially funny smelling and now especially uncomfortable to have another man bending down to take my hand and then sniff it, I thought.

I decided to end the encounter with a polite but firm, ‘it’s not really me’.

Although I’m still looking for that elusive bottle of scent that captures ‘the fragrance of Richard Irvine’. I fear it would linger on the shelves.

So here we were in London’s Selfridges, on a trip to see the cockney in its native habitat.

Well, well, well, what have we got here then?

It’s a cotton dressing gown, it’s blue and it seems to be £640.

Surely this can’t be, even if a barrister had made this and charged it out at his hourly rate it would come in cheaper than this.

I decided to check the pockets, maybe it’s an elaborate joke and there’s £620 in there waiting for the brave customer who buys it, kind of like a reward for stupidity.

I decided I needed another pair of eyes on this and called my girlfriend over.

She settled on the theory that the price was in Pesos or they’d got the decimal point in the wrong place.

Even so, I pointed out, £64 for a dressing gown still seems a lot to me.

I presume the assistant had spotted the confusion, giggling and general behaviour of two people whose dressing gown budget rarely runs into three figures, so she made her way over and asked if we needed any help.

Of course we didn’t, she knew we didn’t but she felt she should ask to stop us making a mess in there.

In fact, the only help we needed was for her to point us in the direction of Topman.

It was then I realised I was being provincial, I am a product of the Provinces, I’m not cut out for all this £640 dressing gown, fragrance sampling big city business.

This was only reinforced by the fact I then spent the next ten minutes following Chris Moyles around the swimming trunks section.

The once chubby DJ looked to have lost a lot of weight but I’d say not really enough to be looking in the Speedo section.

Luckily Victoria, my girlfriend was there to bring me to my senses by saying:

“Oh my god, it’s Chris Moyles, look, look, it’s him, he’s just wandering around looking at trunks as if he were a normal person, Chris Moyles, this is surreal.’

Unfortunately, my brother, who lives in London didn’t share our excitement and instead insisted on showing us a pair of shorts he wanted to buy for £150 (shorts for £150 – I remember when you could buy a house for that).

It was time to move on and laugh at the clothes in the designer section, learn Ralph Lauren has a range of bed sheets and discover it’s also possible to pay more than £600 for a T-shirt before we caught the train back to Liverpool.

Anyway, must go, the postman’s here and I’m still in my new dressing gown, I just paid £640 for it, I’ve got to show it to somebody.