But eventually, inspiration strikes, and I come up with yet another essential take on the burning issues of the day. So, with that in mind: let’s talk intellectual property law!

OK, but hear me out. When a juicy copyright case comes along – especially if it involves two well-known songs – it becomes that rarest of beasts: a news story about which everyone has a view, but that doesn’t directly relate to societal collapse, climate catastrophe and impending doom. What’s not to like?

For instance, I’ve managed to forget many things about Vanilla Ice since his mercifully brief heyday, but some are wonderful to rediscover. Firstly, his real name is Robert Van Winkle.

I don’t have anything to add to this piece of information, but nor do I need to. He dated Madonna for eight months, which would have demanded the invention of the phrase “punching above your weight” if it hadn’t already been coined. And he flatly denied that his colossal hit Ice Ice Baby sounded even remotely like Under Pressure by Queen and David Bowie, never mind that it was audibly just Under Pressure with a bequiffed clown jabbering over it.

Unsurprisingly, Bowie and Queen won that case, but most are more nuanced. Lana Del Rey settled out of court with Radiohead in 2018 over the perceived similarity between her track Get Free and their breakthrough hit Creep.

Fair enough: at certain points it sounds like she’s playing the ‘one song to the tune of another’ round on Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. But Radiohead themselves had to reach a settlement over Creep, deemed to have drawn excessively from the Hollies’ The Air That I Breathe.

When George Harrison was sued over the parallels between My Sweet Lord and the Chiffons’ He’s So Fine, the judgement found that he was guilty of “subconscious plagiarism”. As an aside, the Chiffons had by this point recorded their own version of My Sweet Lord to draw attention to the pending court case. Tangled webs all round.

And after Robin Thicke’s odious Blurred Lines took over the world in 2013, few shed tears when he was successfully sued for borrowing from Marvin Gaye’s Got to Give It Up. But the verdict – based not on the melody but on the wider studio arrangements and overall ‘feel’ of the song – gave pause for thought. As his co-writer Pharrell Williams argued afterwards, it “handicaps any creator out there who is making something that might be inspired by something else.”

We’re all plagiarists, consciously or not. Some wear influences more lightly than others, but it’s usually possible to identify at least some of them. Teenage Fanclub might sound a lot like Big Star, but it would be a pity if Sparky’s Dream couldn’t exist just because September Gurls already did. Two songs on Leonard Cohen’s first album are so similar that he could be accused of plagiarising himself. But I love them both.

As we navigate a world in which art becomes ever easier to obtain, manipulate and repurpose, we’re going to have to rethink our notions around intellectual property and original thought.

We love to believe in the genius of Shakespeare, citing the many words and phrases he supposedly coined as evidence of a unique talent. But if he’d genuinely been the first to come up with these terms, nobody would have had the first idea what he was saying.

Mostly, he was doing what the rest of us do: chewing up influences and regurgitating them as appealingly as possible. And there’s no shame in that – but as a society, we’ll eventually have to move away from the concept that any individual fully owns an idea.

If true originality exists, maybe we’re looking for it in the wrong places. Perhaps there’s a deeper truth to Vanilla Ice’s claim that adding a single beat into a stolen riff created a whole new work of art.

Consider also that he released a live album featuring lengthy audio recordings of a largely visual show, which one critic compared unfavourably to the almost entirely silent LP The Best of Marcel Marceau.

Was that a shameless cash-in or a powerful statement on the inherent limits of human perception? Could it be that there’s only one true creative in the world, and the rest of us are mere details in Bob Van Winkle’s art installation? It would explain a lot.