It’s late (well, lateish) in the evening; kids abed, dinner long done. On an overstuffed armchair in an under-lit living room, a middle-aged man is devouring the latest Ruth Rendell (it’s called Portobello, should you be wondering, and it’s every bit as elegant and as unnerving as you’d expect of the great Dame).

Suddenly, the man starts. A look of disbelief flashes across his pale, unshaven features. He has reached page 57. It begins, innocently enough, with a passage about Eugene and his

addiction to sugar-free sweets.

(Eugene is one of many oddballs in this book; others are Uncle Gib, a religious zealot who writes an agony uncle page for something called the Church of the Children of Zebulun, and his larcenous nephew, Lance.)

But then comes this: “Jon Henley, the Guardian columnist, had written a piece about Uncle Gib in his daily Diary.”

The rest of the paragraph goes on to relate that while the agony uncle himself is “over the moon” at the diarist’s praise for his uncompromising stance on pre- and extramarital sex, Lance dimly grasps that he “was mocking Uncle Gib, sending him up.

“It was all over in about 120 words, of course. And I no longer write the Guardian’s Diary. But imagine! Me, referenced in a book by Baroness Rendell of Babergh, creator of Inspector Wexford, best-selling, critically acclaimed, multi-award-winning author of 50-plus high-end murder mysteries and superior psychological thrillers: the Queen of Crime herself! Why did she choose me?

In a short telephonic conversation, Dame Ruth, a long-standing Guardian reader, tells all. Apparently, she quite liked my Diary.

“I do not use real people in my books very often,” she says. “But I do try to give a picture of the United Kingdom, that it is today. And the very moment I created Uncle Gib, I thought, this is exactly the sort of thing Jon Henley would get hold of and send up.”

She said some other stuff too, actually, about my “unique style” and “special flavour”, but as my wife very sensibly remarked: “You can’t write that, no one will believe you.” So I won’t. But hey, who cares? I am, at last, famous.