It's Wednesday. Only just, but it is Wednesday. Best make that clear at the outset in case something major has happened since, a late-breaking scandal or outrage that's instantly captured hearts, minds and headlines.

Normally, it wouldn't matter. Normally, in the early hours of Wednesday morning, this column isn't even a gleam in its author's bloodshot eye. Normally, it hasn't even become a twinkle when Thursday's sun ascends.

Normally, it isn't even half finished, let alone half baked, when the noon-day rooster crows and tattooed men with known gang affiliations start banging on the door, yelling, "The editor says, if you hasn't filed your fatuous thoughts in 30 seconds flat, he's authorised us to burn your (landlord's) house down."

All of which means topicality isn't usually a problem. Producing something - anything - in time for the late edition is the problem.

But this week is different. This week employment calls (hallelujah). This week an aircraft awaits. So the words must come early this week and that's that.

Except, sod's law being what it is, you can guarantee this will be the week when events take some unexpected turn, thus rendering what follows as irrelevant as a time limit when Colonel Gaddafi is boring the pants off all the panting bores at the United Nations.

Not that Kiwis gave a toss about the Libyan leader's rant-a-thon. The loquacious loony could have waffled on for 90 hours and we wouldn't have cared. Because we knew the world was watching someone else. And we knew who. We knew the world was watching our dude, Big John, Captain Key.

It didn't matter what he was doing - climbing into cars, hopping out of showers, nipping into noshes, pressing the flesh with the Prez, doing the biz on Letterman - we were enthralled. Suddenly, the United Nations had two heavenly bodies - Ban Ki-Moon and John Key Sun - and we were in seventh heaven on cloud nine.

Or most of us were. Some serious commentators clearly disapproved, arguing that the PM's all-conquering, record-breaking, peacemaking, world-shaking trip to New York was just a frivolous montage of photo opportunities, and that our journalists' mawkish coverage of its every trivial element merely proved how far they'd gone down the frippery slope.

Such loftiness ignores our insatiable appetite for trivia. We love the stuff. Can't get enough of it.

When all's said and done - as it often is - trivia and gossip are the essence of our engagement with the world. Except when we're being terrified by some real or imagined catastrophe. And if trivia reigned in New York then, clearly, we weren't being terrified.