I LOVED THE STORY in The Times on Wednesday about the One Day in History project, in which thousands of bloggers recorded the details of their day to create a record of life in Britain in 2006. I loved the kid who got into trouble at boarding school for spilling water in the shower (“which I didn’t do”) and I loved the little girl who had a scary dream and the tired Polish woman doing the “houseworks” and the bored lawyer on the train . . . and do you know why I loved them so? Because they were little chunks of writing about nothing, and that is so hard to find nowadays.

For most of the 20th century, all the best fiction was about nothing: the novels of Proust, Joyce, Bellow, a lot of Mann and Hesse, Günther Grass and Borges, certainly all of Raymond Carver and Beckett, were about absolutely nothing at all. Often just the acute and minute observation of everyday life. But the British novel of today, for no literary reason I can see, is ruinously obsessed with plot.

It seems that publishers just won’t buy fiction unless it is “about” something. Nor am I thinking especially of genre fiction or the ones that get bought and pushed hard because they have wizards in them, and magic and other worlds. Every new literary novel I’ve read in recent years has been desperately, depressingly full of content.

The recent Booker shortlist, for example, offered us a novel set during the war with (oo-er) time running backwards; a novel about a transportee in 19th-century Australia; a novel narrated (as any novel that is to succeed in our infantilised market must be) by a bonkers child; a novel partially narrated by an abused child (even better); a novel narrated by a child in war-torn Tripoli; and a novel, the winner, about boring old India, written in that dripping, florid, rapturous style so beloved of women who eat Cadbury’s Milk Tray and float scented candles in the bath.

It’s not so true in America, where Richard Ford, Nicholson Baker, Jonathan Franzen and, of course, Updike and Roth rarely pretend to have a subject beyond life itself.

I’m not saying that there isn’t a place for the occasional time-running-backwards novel set in a warzone and narrated by an abused Indian child with learning difficulties. I’m just saying that the blog project made me realise I’d rather read an eventless memoir by a bored lawyer.

Maybe it really is time for books to go and blogs to take over. Certainly, it is disconcerting to read a paragraph by Heidi Elliott, from Ulster, that runs: “I woke from a really scary dream, where I was going down a really long tube like waterslides, only thinner and it went on for ages”, and find oneself wondering if she isn’t the best writer currently working in Britain.

• I HAVE BEEN honking on about cod in my restaurant columns for years. I never eat it, I punitively mark down restaurants that serve it, and this year I turned down (and still weep occasionally to think of) a fee equal to five years’ pay for this column for ten days’ work advertising a company that sells it.

  And so do you know what I thought when I saw the headline “The end of cod” in this newspaper (after the initial moment when, because I was hung over and the paper was upside-down on the newsstand, I thought it said “The end of God”, and couldn’t work out why such a big story would be illustrated by a gloved hand holding a fish)? I thought: “Good.” Because it serves you bloody right. You refused to believe it was true, you just tittered and carried on eating it, no doubt joking that “if it’s disappearing anyway then one might as well enjoy it while it lasts, ha ha ha”, and now you can’t have any more. And I’m delighted.

  I dare say you were shocked by the news that “Although cod catches had been cut to 26,500 tonnes a year . . . fishermen chasing other species such as haddock, whiting, hake and plaice accidentally caught about 50,000 tonnes of cod last year, and had to throw the dead fish back into the sea because it is classed as an illegal catch.”

  I wasn’t. I knew already. It’s why I don’t eat haddock, whiting, hake or plaice either. Amazing, though, isn’t it? Fishermen and legislators are working so harmoniously together that twice as many of “Britain’s favourite fish” as are legally landed and eaten are thrown back dead into the sea (millions upon millions of quite large corpses) to keep everyone happy.

  Like that’s going to help. Christ, if the fish are dead anyway, we might as well eat them. But no. No suggestion that designated cod fishing should have been banned entirely and the quota filled with bycatch. That would at least, God help us, have saved the 26,500 tonnes taken deliberately.

  And so cod is gone and, like the relatives of a long-suffering patient who has finally died, I am simply relieved it’s all over. Just as I will be when, because you didn’t listen, and didn’t think it was your responsibility (with your ludicrous Burkean faith in a laissez-faire Universe), we run out for ever of wild salmon, and caviar, and polar bears and pandas, and there are no more birds because there are no more insects, and no more forests and no more fresh water, but then again no dry land to get thirsty on.

  Really, I’ll just be so happy not to have to worry about it anymore.

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