Petronella Wyatt

Please excuse my returning to the subject of teeth, but I've had molars on my mind. Since my trip to America where my British teeth were looked upon with horror, I have been examining them day and night. It would be fair to say that this has become an obsession. In restaurants with friends and colleagues I will lose my train of thought and start thinking of teeth. Instead of asking the waiter for some hollandaise sauce with my asparagus, it will come out as, 'Could you please bring me some hollandaise teeth.' When I excuse myself to go to the loo it is invariably my intention to open my mouth like a hippo and stare into the mirror. At home I have tried to remove stains with household items varying from kitchen knives to a needle. I did quite well with the needle, actually.

There seems to be some question as to whether Saddam Hussein's two daughters, Raghad and Rana, and their nine children aged between seven and 16 will be allowed to apply for asylum in Britain. Their sponsor is a cousin of the family, a Mr Izzi (Izzard)-Din Mohammed Hassan al-Majid. This gentleman, who is a businessman, apparently lives in a bungalow in Leeds. If Saddam's family were granted asylum here they would live on a council estate in the town at the taxpayer's expense. It transpires that Saddam's former wife would like to join them. Should she manage to smuggle herself into the country, the government has admitted that it might find it hard to get her out. It is difficult to imagine the Hussein family living blissfully on a council estate in Leeds, even if it is free.

I was interested to read in one of the newspapers that my old friend Robert Hardman had had his teeth surgically whitened for an article. Frankly, in all the years I have known him, I have never paid any attention to Robert's teeth. This is no slight. It is merely that, when I saw the name Hardman, the immediate word association was not ivories. At least not the ones in his mouth, for he does play a mean theme tune on the upright piano. This indicates one of two things. Either that Robert's teeth always appeared perfectly acceptable. Or that I am not a teeth person. The truth is a bit (sorry) of both. Robert's teeth had never sprung to my notice because they seemed perfectly, typically, normal teeth.

Like most people, I first heard or rather read of the Gothic novel in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. The heroine and her friend are gabbing away about The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole – at least I think it was The Castle of Otranto. Years ago, the BBC produced a serial based on Northanger Abbey which attempted, but failed to create a suitably Gothic atmosphere. Lately, television attempted a straight version of Lady Audley's Secret, a Victorian Gothic novel, and another borrowed from some tale of a madwoman who appears, limb by limb, through the plaster of a ceiling.

I have just returned from Morocco, or Marrakech, to be precise; the rose-pink city with its hidden gardens and ancient, tiled palaces. This was against the advice of an American friend who protested vigorously when I announced my visit. 'You can't go there,' she howled, 'it's an Islamic country. They'll all be pro-Saddam and anti-Bush. They'll probably tear you to pieces.' I thought this highly unlikely as in my experience the Moroccans are a gentle people who are only likely to tear you to pieces if you refuse to buy one of their hideous carpets made by a tribe called the Berbers. Nevertheless, I expected the joint to be hotter than usual – politically that is. I packed a heavy scarf in case I came across any weapons of mass destruction.

I had my half-brother Pericles staying here in London for the first time in four years. Pericles, who is my father's son by his third wife, Moorea, went to live in America when I was about 14. It was a very brave move at the time, as he was only 18 and had no qualifications, but it has turned out to be a remarkably wise one. He and his precariously pretty wife now run an extraordinarily successful RV park/ waterworld in Arizona. In the winter it takes 500 motor homes of up to 40-ft long and in the summer, when the weather is too hot for campers, it becomes a park with whirly water slides. During the winter my brother goes to work at four in the morning, gives cooking demonstrations, arranges line dances and other entertainments, before going to bed around nine.

I cannot help but feel sorry for Michael Trend, the disgraced Conservative MP, who allegedly defrauded the taxpayer by claiming a whopping sum in false expenses. Michael Trend's career and perhaps his life is now in ruins and he can look forward only to an eventual ignominious obscurity. I wish to announce at once that Mr Trend is a family friend. Ho, you might say, if someone is a friend it's all right then, they have merely 'acted like a fool'. Whereas had I never met Mr Trend you might expect me to excoriate him as an example of corruption in British politics. You would be perfectly right. One prefers to believe one's friends are fools rather than scoundrels. In many cases, unfortunately, this is a delusion.

I hardly spend my life attending dinner parties given by the chattering classes. But I will admit to attending dinners given by people who chatter - though not in the Hampstead/Islington fashion but more in the Tory manner, if it exists any more except in muddled gobbledegook. Most of these people have been scathing about Tony Blair ever since he came to power and now they are more scathing than ever. The irritating thing about their criticism is its hypocrisy. Blair's crime used to be that he was a hollow man, with no convictions, whose only ambition was popularity and whose only policy was to follow Sun opinion polls. (His only good point was that he seemed 'safe' on the economy.) Now he is attacked by the same men and women for being the opposite.

I am not in the least bit surprised that the Americans are furious and bewildered by the churlish actions of France and Germany which are now threatening to destroy Nato. As has been pointed out, not only did hundreds of thousands of US servicemen, many of them little more than boys, die liberating Western Europe in the second world war, but American support for Nato during the Cold War and up till the present day has bestowed upon its beneficiaries a great deal more than a mere defence system. Consider the vast amount of money America has poured into Europe. This has saved European governments from having to spend more themselves, thus freeing them up to give their peoples a better quality of life.

As I wrote last week, Florida, not to mention the United States, is full of surprises. Many practising Christians show a marked lack of opposition to scientific advances that cause hysteria in Britain. One of these is cloning. Expressing my distaste for recreating human beings I used the specious argument that, surely, for the religious, God was meant to create man, so was it not wrong for the latter to usurp that role? This met with the response that God created man in His own image and cloning was simply creating more human beings in His own image. I was also enlightened during conversations with some of the matriarchs of the Gulf coast as to their positive views on the use of such techniques as DNA testing. Personally, however, I refused to shift ground on this one.

Roy Jenkins was my father's oldest friend. They first met when they were both at Oxford. When, afterwards, they both decided to go into politics, my father pipped him to the post. Much later, when I was growing up in Wiltshire, where we had a house, two of our neighbours were Roy and his pearl-pretty wife Jennifer. I don't remember much about Roy in those days except that he was a highly competitive tennis and croquet partner. My father played tennis rather as a drunkard attempts sex. There was not much bounce to the ounce. He raised his arm to serve, rotated it several times, all the while emitting loud and fantastical noises, and hit the ball into the net. One Saturday, Roy visited us with a young man who had a job as a researcher at the BBC.

This has been the season of goodwill. Which, of course, it hasn't. I am sorry for stating the obvious but there is always less goodwill around at Christmas than any other time of the year. The newspapers seem more vicious, more scandal-ridden and more aggressive than in spring, summer or autumn. This is principally because there aren't many real stories around as the politicians push off for their holidays. Nevertheless, one is often repelled by the hypocrisy of heartwarming yuletide tales juxtaposed with no-holds-barred attacks on those who cannot answer back. I have been particularly disgusted by the persecution of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent and their children. First, the media decided to try to boot the Kents out of their grace and favour apartment in Kensington Palace.

'Tis the season to be self-deprecating. Or even more self-deprecating than during the rest of the year. The traditional British custom of laughing while others tell insulting stories about you, running yourself down, making yourself look a perfect ass, and being the butt of practical jokes, while keeping a fixed grin on your face, really comes into its own in late December and early January. My father was very good at using this peculiar device against others during Christmas. Family members were teased about their supposedly inadequate sex lives or careers and then expected to be the first to giggle - which, of course, they always did. If we had people to stay my father would put itching powder in their beds.

As I wrote last week, there I was in the middle of the South African bush wrapped in a blanket to stave off the cold. Karl, the strapping ranger, had staved off the animals, but there seemed no remission from the biting air. On our way back to the lodge, we saw some rhino immersed in a pool - perhaps in the hope that the water was warmer. Their deep-pink underbellies were about the shade of my freezing hands. The following morning, however, the weather let up. I woke to skies the colour of Anatolian waters. The sun was beating down on the copper earth. At last, I said to myself, time for a bit of relaxation by the swimming-pool. So I grabbed my bikini and made my way up to where the pool was located.

The tiny propeller plane that seemed to be made from beaten tin dipped and shuddered in the air. One of the girls opposite me turned the colour of vegetable bouillon. The pilot briskly apologised for the turbulence which he attributed to heavy clouds and the unsettled weather, unusual for this time of year in South Africa. His confident manner was belied by the small tremor in his voice. We were, if God permitted, on our way to a game reserve called Ulusaba. It is one and a half hours (by tin plane) north of Johannesburg and owned by Richard Branson. I had never been to a game reserve before. But I had seen Mogambo with Clark Gable and Ava Gardner and imagined it must be highly romantic if rather spartan.

I have just been staying outside Rome near a town called Ladispoli. In ancient times, the area, which was a luxury seaside resort for various Roman emperors, was called Alsium. During the second Punic war it managed to exempt itself from having to send troops to fight Hannibal. Later, both Tiberius and Marcus Aurelius had villas there in order to escape from the broiling heat of the Roman summer and its accompanying stench. Getting into Rome is probably more difficult now than it was those thousands of years ago. A la Livingstone, a lot of the city has been pedestrianised and cars require a special permit to enter the centre. This leaves one at the mercy of the Roman taxi-driver, who makes his English counterpart look like Talleyrand for subtlety and good manners.

This month marks the birthday, in 1880, of the great American polemicist H.L. Mencken. Mencken was born in Baltimore, and in the 1920s and 1930s was the most feared and admired writer in the United States. He spared no one his caustic honesty; politicians, church leaders, academics, quack doctors, puritans, fanatics and other species he referred to as 'boobus Americanus'. A few years ago, having mentioned Mencken in a column in this magazine, I was deeply honoured when the Mencken Society in Baltimore asked me to deliver its annual lecture. At the party afterwards, we sat around and asked ourselves why there were no men of his stature and courage today.

The fashion folk are upon us again. The other day I was reading a list of so-called must-have fashion items in one of the newspapers. These included a Matthew Williamson evening dress, costing over £1,000 and resembling a tea towel. Other indispensables were a Chloe bag at £720, which looked as if someone had peed down the sides, and a Hermes necklace that I wouldn't put on my dog Mimi. Aha, my detractors will cry, what about Wyatt and all her designer kit? It was once alleged that when I was 21 I wore Chanel suits to work. This is naturally incorrect. They were mostly Armani. I should like to point out, actually, that my attitude to fashion is not quite as blind as all that. As an historian of sorts, I view clothes and hats as pieces of living history. I live my clothes.