One thing this column has in common with Keith Vaz? Neither of us has a title - yet. Robert Crampton is Beta Male, Carol Midgley is the Bargainhunter - but I am just an anonymous Notebook. I'm in distinguished company, but without anything to distinguish me. Just like a select committee chairman on the Labour benches.

While I was reflecting on the relative anonymity of being just a Notebook (am I merely an A4 ring-bound jotter from WH Smith or can I aspire to be a Moleskine writer's pad?), my wife offered a suggestion. “Surely,” she said, reflecting on the fact that I accidentally shampooed my daughter's head with bath oil over the weekend, “your column should be called Sad Dad?”

She has a point. How Sad am I? Let me count the ways. I am increasingly keen to learn how to play golf. Conversations with my wife revolve, more and more, around the Lakeland catalogue. Kicking over the traces means deciding not to read the Home Affairs Select Committee report immediately after the children have been put to bed but instead mainlining on some Dornford Yates. Sure, my perfect Friday night fantasy still involves Emily Maitlis and Kirsty Wark - but now, in my dreams, they present an in-depth analysis of election results to the Scottish Parliament while I enjoy some nice cheese on toast.

One of the saddest of my qualities is an inability properly to realise how very sad some of my behaviour appears to others. Take postcodes. One of my most cherished possessions is a map of London overlaid with the boundaries of the capital's postcodes. For me, there is a special pleasure in seeing just how the delineation between, say, W10 and W11 is drawn. These, apparently arbitrary, borders define the communities by which we know London. Notting Hill and North Kensington, like Austria and Hungary, may be neighbours with a shared history but they are also distinct entities with different characters. W11 is a place full of bankers, expensive delis and people called Freud - just like Habsburg Vienna. W10 is a land of unpublished poets, opposition politicians and impoverished noble families - the Hungary of a hundred years ago recreated in red brick.

Sad as this dwelling on this fantasy topography may be, sadder still is the delight I took in discovering the hidden logic behind the numbering of London's postcodes. With the exception of the first two, the numbers precede by alphabetical logic. W3 is Acton, W4, Chiswick, W5, Ealing, W6, Hammersmith, W7, Hanwell and so on. All the way to W10 Notting Hill and W11 North Kensington. SW3 is Chelsea, SW4, Clapham, SW5, Earls Court, SW6, Fulham, etc - all the way to Tooting, Wandsworth and Wimbledon. When I first worked this progression out for myself I felt a sense of joy similar, I imagine, to Keats on first opening Chapman's Homer or Stout Cortes on glimpsing the Pacific.

I told you I was sad.

Wrong side of the tracks

But sadder still is the tragic way in which postcodes have acquired a new significance in the lives of our children. While visiting a youth project in West London recently I talked to the teenagers there about knife crime and gang culture. For them, an interest in territorial boundaries wasn't a mild eccentricity but an absolute necessity. Modern London gangs define themselves by postcode. Step into the wrong neighbourhood, wear the wrong colours in a postcode not your own, and you risk attack. There is something chilling about the fact that the fantasy conflicts between London communities, the enmities between postcode boundaries that Chesterton invented for his satire, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, now have a tragic contemporary resonance.

Modern gang culture takes something innate in human nature, the need to belong, and allows it to descend into a Lord of the Flies-like abandonment to violence.

Mission creep

My irritant of the week? “Mission critical”. Some bod on Today was outlining to John Humphrys the vital need of another sweeping bureaucratic intrusion into this, that or the other when he let off a massive blast of verbal flatulence and declared that some part of his agenda was “mission critical”. I'll get critical on your mission, sonny.

I suspect you mean your proposal was essential, or perhaps even indispensable. But plain English, even plain polysyllabic English, wasn't good enough. Do you have to borrow Army jargon and assert that monitoring eyebrow growth in the under-fives, or whatever it

may have been, was critical to the success of your mission? Let me tell you, it's all right to use a phrase like mission critical when you're briefing people at Basra, but deploy it out of area and you risk being arraigned at a UN tribunal for torturing the English language.

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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