Diary

The 13th Earl of Haddington (cr. 1619) was minded to revise his theory about crop circles to incorporate pixies, he told me the other day while we were enjoying a pre-dinner cigarette at the chimney piece of a grand dining-room in Chillingham Castle, Northumberland. Lord H. – a whiskery, engaging gent in tartan trousers –

Within an hour of returning to the Commons after a sabbatical tour of ex-British South Asia I find myself plunged into the firefighters’ strike. The Blairites have long been envious of the glass-jawed opponents who queued up to be walloped by Mrs Thatcher. But during Monday’s Downing Street press conference the Prime Minister modestly disavowed

They’ve scrubbed it off now, but until recently the outer wall of Hackney’s HSBC bore a weird piece of graffiti. The ugly felt-tip scribble stood out harshly against the whitewashed stone. It consisted of a girl’s name (illegible), then the equals sign, and then ‘horing buckethole sellpussygal 10p a hour’. When I saw it, I

Whatever critics might say about Martin Amis’s Kobra the Dread, his recent book on Stalin’s atrocities, he was certainly right when he pointed out that people are generally indulgent, even flippant, about communist tyrants in a way they would never be about Nazis. This thought strikes me every morning as I walk through Canary Wharf

I am in the midst of a tour promoting a book, The Political Animal. Like all journeys in this country, it is almost impossible to travel anywhere with any confidence that you will arrive within a day of your anticipated time. A trip to Norfolk, which ought to have taken three hours, lasted five. The

Editing a newspaper is not a dinner party, as Chairman Mao would have observed had he been running a tabloid, but you sure do get invited to dinners and lunches and breakfasts, most of which are politely turned down because there is a paper to publish and competitors to clobber mercilessly and ceaselessly. But, thanks

A glorious sunny day in Spain, and I have just been certified a genuine, card-carrying, paid-up cripple. Actually, being an old-age pensioner and a householding resident of Catalonia, I wasn’t required to pay or say anything. My doctor did the talking, and had to, because I can’t speak a word of Catalan. Anyway, it was

Sunday: Ducked morning service in favour of gardening, but made it to a special evening service to celebrate the Jubilee year and the community of our parish. In the midst of a powerful sermon on how technology has changed village life, the rector clamped his mobile to his ear, yelling, ‘I am in the pulpit.

Kabul On the trail of genetic traces of Alexander’s soldiers in Afghanistan, I arrived in Badakhshan, the country’s most remote and beautiful province that abuts China. I went to see my old friends at the government guest house, which is set on an island in the middle of the Kokcha river. We sat on a

And so to Blackpool. But how? Train: disgracefully expensive, probably delayed, full of broadsheet journalists (apart from the Independent), possibility of being jumped in the buffet carriage by a beaming Richard Branson dispensing pork pies. Car: long, boring, held up by roadworks and impoverished Independent journalists in jalopies. Plane: ten minutes from Canary Wharf to

In the electronic age, a social disease is a virus you get from your email correspondents. And often from one-night stands. Three such co-respondents sent me word that as an entry in their ‘address book’ my computer now had some awful disease. Complicated instructions to erase followed. When questioned, not one of the owners of

I shall call him the Unknown Afghan Hero. The BBC footage of the assassination attempt on Hamid Karzai showed a civilian greeting the Afghan president through the window of his limousine. Suddenly, several shots rung out and this civilian, reacting instantaneously, swung round and hurled himself upon the would-be assassin, as did another man, before

I can’t imagine why people claim to enjoy camping. Before the trip – a six-week overland slog through southern Africa – I joked with friends about how impractical and ill-suited to the Outward Bound lifestyle I am; how I’m never knowingly more than six feet from a make-up bag, and am incapable of assembling, with

The workers teem over the building site that suddenly appeared on the overgrown river-bed which my holiday cottage overlooks. They like to get an early start before the merciless Andalusian sun starts roasting their leathery hides. A couple of hours before breakfast a raucous but not unappealing cacophony of tuned power tools fills the air.

Despite feeling ghoulish, my wife and I found ourselves drawn to the television set whenever an important development took place during the grim vigil at Soham. By the very nature of the event much of the footage and commentary was banal and, like the press, unavoidably intrusive. Sky was sharper, the BBC’s much-mocked News 24

In 1755 Lisbon was ruined by a massive earthquake, the shock waves from which were felt as far away as Switzerland. When the rumbling stopped, a great fire ensued, followed by a tsunami that washed away coastal villages. As I awoke on Tuesday morning, I had good reason to believe that Portugal’s capital was about