I SEE WHERE Prank Kelly has been described in this paper, in terms of his humour, as "a comfortable chintz sofa of the old school."

Hmmm. This makes Dermot Morgan a regal chaise longue of the early Elizabethan period, Pauline McLynn an unbuttoned Restoration settee and Ardal O'Hanlon a rare Bauhaus divan.

Yes, and Eddie Izzard a renovated 1920s Lloyd Loom armchair, Dylan Moran a Zanotta futon and Sean Hughes a semi wound Bisque spring radiator.

Fine. Right. I have been reading What Falls Away, Mia Farrow's own life story (Doubleday, £16.99).

Correction: I have not been reading the book, but various reviews of it. From these reviews I have now determined it is one of the books I least wish to read (on a par with Blake Morrison's As If which sounds almost as odious as his When Did You Last See Your Father?, which I did mistakenly read).

That's right: I have approved of very little confessional prose since the Confiteor.

It is of course one of the main purposes of book reviewing, or should be, to make clear to the reader when a book should not be purchased under any circumstances, so I am grateful to all, or most, of the Farrow reviewers.

We are all supposed to be horrified and/or amused, for example, at Mia's revelation that it took her former partner Woody Allen some weeks, with the aid of his psychoanalyst, to make the transition from polyester satin to cotton sheets.

So what if it did? Polyester satin sheets are a perfectly respectable choice of bed linen. They are hard wearing and still look good after years of laundering. It is not at all difficult to find such sheets at reasonable prices and in a wide range of design and colour.

Cotton sheets, on the other hand, have been ludicrously over praised in recent years, mainly for fashion reasons and half baked environmental notions regarding "pure" fibres v man made materials. Little cognisance is taken of the fact that cotton comes in different qualities, and that much of it is very poor indeed.

It seems very likely that Woody Allen was happy for many years, in so far as he has ever been happy, with polyester satin sheets. And no matter what sheets one uses, one usually spends about a third of a lifetime lying on them. So there is no reason why the decision to switch to different sheets should be taken lightly.

And for all we know, Woody Allen's psychoanalyst might be an expert adviser in the area.

Anyway. I am more interested in the reference by the Guardian reviewer to Woody Allen's line - "The heart wants what it wants." The reviewer, Linda Grant, suggests this is another version of Marlon Brando's line, "The penis has its own agenda."

Yes indeed: we are talking of territories beyond the control of the conscious mind (and way beyond the unconscious).

Oh all right dear, of self justification.

Or are we? I had a chat recently - with my own psychoanalyst. All informal of course, not a couch session. We were up in the Carrick Hall at the time having a Friday evening drink and talking of Woody and Mia, when Harry drained his glass of gin, ordered two more, and suddenly remarked, apropos nothing in particular, "The liver is its own custodian."

Harry is a man of few words (he has to listen to a lot more) and I certainly was not going to pry into he "meaning," a word which Harry rightly abhors.

Instead I kept silent for about 15 minutes, ordered another round by merely nodding to Peter the barman, sipped my drink, then shyly announced: "The spleen feels good about itself."

Harry got off his stool and took a walk to the other end of the bar. I was pleased. From my couch sessions I knew this was his way of expressing approval. Harry then returned, swivelled on his bar stool and confided into his gin that "The gall bladder is always half full."

Over the next half hour or so we had agreed (or at any rate not denied) that the duodenum knows nothing of pressure, the clavicle awaits its break, the womb knows the prison outside and the ankle is its own seducer.

Another hour and three more drinks then passed without either of us speaking. When the barman called time, I was on the point of asserting that the appendix lives in fear of its relevance, but I thought the better of it. Then we had one for the road.