Hi. Hope all is well with you. I’ve just read the thrilling news that Abi Titmuss is to play Lady Macbeth at the Seagull Theatre, Lowestoft, and it got me to thinking about just what in the world is ... hang on, what happened there? Don’t tell me I began this column by saying that I hope all is well with you. Oh no, I did.

I can hardly be blamed. It’s the first sentence of every e-mail I ever read, and I suppose it must be contagious. But where on earth did it come from? Every e-mail I get, whether it’s a commission from a newspaper or magazine, a letter from my bank, a reminder from the gas company or a cunning financial plan from West Africa, begins, “Hi”, or “Dear Giles” or (very, very rarely) “Dear Mr Coren”, and then “Hope all is well with you”.

I have just this minute, for example, deleted an e-mail from the Master of a Cambridge college asking me to come and talk about sustainable food systems, gratis and without fee, to a roomful of goggling nano-boffins, that began: “Dear Giles, hope all is well with you.”

In the first place, how come, “Giles”? I’ve never met the four-eyed conehead. Can they not bring themselves, even in tanktop-wearing, cycle-crazy, straight As, gowns-for-dinner, saving-myself- till-I’m-married Cambridge, to call a man they’ve never met “Mr”? It’s a wonder Professor Bumstorm (as I’ll call him to save his blushes) didn’t go the whole hog and address me as “Giley”.

But that’s not my grumble. My grumble is this awful, throw away, “hope all is well with you” thing that they insist on opening with.

Why do they hope that all is well with me? Not for my sake, I’ll wager, but for theirs.

My dozens of daily unmet wellwishers are hoping that I am not lying slumped and cold on the floor of my downstairs loo because then I won’t be able to write a feature for their stupid magazine about the death of the dinner party, or give them a spell of work experience or send them a cheque for fifty grand so as to free up millions farther down the line, or come and eat a terrible dinner in their draughty craphole of a college.

I suppose that they feel that they have to say something vaguely me-related and polite because it might sound in some way rude to just start in with what they’re trying to wheedle out of me. It’s like the endless internal e-mails that come to “all Times users” that used to be very rare and always began “I’m really sorry to bother you with one of these infuriating ‘global e-mails’, but I’ve tried all my contacts and just can’t seem to get a lead — has anyone got a contact number for Fidel Castro’s proctologist?”, but which now come at least six times an hour and just say: “Usual apologies, anyone got a Pritt stick?”

But that’s not an apology! And you need to apologise to me, because it drives me up the wall here in Kentish Town, permanently logged on to the Times e-mail system as I am, always rummaging in my drawers for the required item and then worrying how on earth I’m going to get it across town to Wapping in time to avert what is clearly a major crisis.

But “Hope all is well with you” is even worse. For what it seeks to do is to establish a theoretical mood plane on which you are currently buzzing along like a happy bee, untroubled by the woes of the world, almost certainly having a better time than your correspondent, in a state from which it would be impossible to say no to whatever he or she wants.

If, they reason, you happen to be recovering from major heart surgery at the present time, then you can be forgiven for being unenthusiastic about running a half-marathon in Battersea Park on Sunday to raise money for the local school’s “buy every pupil a cormorant” campaign. But if all is well with you, well then, put on your trainers, man, and stop snivelling!

But it all rather depends on how you define “well”. Are you worried about something big that you might not have heard about on account of your not being quite in the thick of my private wellness loop?

Are you worried that I may recently have had cancer diagnosed, lost my job or mislaid a favourite pet? Or perhaps that my girlfriend passed away in the night and that I awoke this morning to find her stiff corpse gathering flies beside me in the bed, and therefore, having logged on regardless, to check my e-mails and do a bit of tweeting, may think it rude if you do not account for the possibility in your opening line?

And that my fury at your failure to acknowledge that all might not be well with me might make me less likely to visit your restaurant with a view to writing a review/give your daughter a job/recommend a keenly-priced Mongolian grill with a good buzz, sensible wine list and good music not too far from Snaresbrook Tube?

Who knows? Luckily Esther made it through the night, and so all is well on that front. I also woke up this morning myself, so that was a bonus. I had breakfast without choking on a nut and followed up with a satisfactory bowel movement. You could call that a hell of a morning if you liked. But when you say “all” ... I mean, how deeply do you want me to reflect?

For example, I am 40 years old and creak more grievously every morning. I played Fives last night and by the end of a match in which I was comfortably the worst (because the oldest) player on court I could barely walk. I have a lot of work to do, not all of it very appealing.

I have just wasted 20 minutes of my morning trying to get through to Abbey National (whose automated voice line was interested only in repeatedly telling me that they would soon be changing their name to Santander, as if anyone in the world, as long as he is getting a half-decent mortgage rate, is going to care what name his building society uses to introduce itself at parties) so that I could transfer some more of my life savings into a current account to pay the builders I hired in April and was hoping would be out by June but who are currently downstairs relaying the cloakroom lino for the 14th time because they still haven’t managed to cut the right shape to get it flush with the bog bowl stand.

I have people coming to dinner tonight, one of whom has just revealed that his girlfriend is a vegan, and another of whom wants to bring his mother.

The industry in which I have worked these past 17 years is practically on its knees and even the most optimistic projections say that I will be working in a call centre by the time I am 45, which is also the age at which, having dithered and dithered these past 20 years, I may finally get around to having children, who will never know me as anything but a decrepit old man who died of old age before they left school, so, no, ALL IS NOT WELL WITH ME.

And what are you going to do about it? Are you going to send flowers? Are you going to remember me in your prayers? Or are you just going to press on with whatever the hell barefaced piece of baldarse beggary you had in mind?

Anyway, so. Abi Titmuss is to play Lady Macbeth. Whatever.

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