The mysterious Mr Moly's website Few arts journalists, I fancy, would be unmoved by the opportunity to behave like a proper reporter for a few minutes, assuming there is no actual gunfire involved and you don't have to stray too far from decent latte facilities.
So, when offered the chance to meet an anonymous source - albeit one of the most famous anonymouses around - of course I leapt at it, pausing only to collect my grubby raincoat, green visor and hip flask of sippin' whisky before heading off to the West End.
The Mr X in question is the creator of Holy Moly, the hugely popular successor to Pop Bitch, supplying a startlingly large public with the yellowest showbiz smut and pop misanthropy around by means of a well-designed website and weekly newsletter.
There's an awkward moment when I arrive at the swank West End members' bar set for our meeting, as the door staff want to know who I'm meeting before they'll let me in. "I know him only as Mr Moly," I explain, which doesn't get me very far. Eventually, I bore them into letting me in and start scouring the assembled drinkers for someone looking anonymous. He's told me only that he'll be wearing a "wanky puffa jacket", and I accuse the very droll broadcaster David Quantick of being Mr Moly before spotting a be-stubbled man in his early 30s hunched over a laptop in the corner.
He's a very personable individual, it turns out, and endearingly upfront about the fact that the book he's promoting is a shameless Crimbo cash-in. The Rules of Modern Life is lifted more or less straight from the Holy Moly site, and is a quite well illustrated series of swipes at contemporary nonsense, ranging from the satirical to the fashionably vicious. "I wanted to get something out for Christmas," he says, "and that part of the site required the least amount of physical effort on my part to do."
He's obviously proud of the website's success: "It gets 21m page impressions a month, 2m unique users, 170,000 subscribe to the mailout, yadda yadda yadda." But he's also frustrated that such a huge success has hitherto generated only a trickle of income from t-shirt sales - hence the 'festive' extension of the brand.
Mr Moly is of course a great supplier of showbiz tittle tattle. We have a very interesting chat about a squeaky-clean TV presenter whose very heavy-handed groping antics are well-known throughout the media, but remains rather mysteriously unexposed by the tabloids - so far.
But what fascinates me is the amount of really quite raw, visceral hatred for the famous - blameless or otherwise - which fuels the site. "Celebrities," he says, "signed their own death penalty the second they allowed people to come and view their beautiful wife and beautiful children in Hello! I think there's a very short leap from there to looking at Jade Goody's cellulite on the cover of Heat."
I say that I've really rather warmed to Jade since Big Brother. "Yeah, she's alright," he admits, but immediately goes on to say "I've got a real problem with people being celebrities for celebrity's sake. Being a celebrity used to be a by-product of being really fucking good at something...
"When I was 12 or 13 I was desperate to be a famous singer. I didn't think 'I'll just go down to China White's and hopefully shag one of Blue's backing band,' you know - you learnt an instrument, you studied that craft, and being famous was part of the wrapping paper of that success."
On this subject we have an agreeable disagreement, with me trying to persuade him that there is something weirdly reminiscent of punk rock among today's crop of brazenly ordinary pop stars - because one of the best things about punk rock was its defiant ordinariness - and that although it's bent out of shape by marketing and TV we shouldn't blame the stars, because we have the same dreams.
The odd thing is, of course, that with the success of the site, and now the book - he's making an anonymous TV appearance later today - he's in danger of becoming a celebrity himself.
'I don't exist..." he grins. "I'm hardly a celebrity. I'm not a celebrity."
Of course not. But then, I bet you lots of celebrities - perhaps even Jade Goody - would say the same thing.
