Notebook: Mr Mandelson's extremely odd gift The strange things parents give you

WHAT DO Lynn Barber, Ian Hislop and Michael Palin have in common with Peter Mandelson? One predictable answer is Oxford University - this is England after all - but another and more interesting link is the work of the artist, Chris Orr. They're all fans of his, to varying degrees, though Mandelson is the only one of them who has been exposed (I think that's the word) for being so.

The story rates only a mention in Donald Macintyre's otherwise exhaustive biography, which was published last week (or so they say - try finding a copy), but at the time it was mildly sensational. To refresh the memory: when Mandelson was made Minister Without Portfolio in 1997 one of his first and most pleasant tasks was to choose some art from the Government Art Collection to hang on his office wall. The collection, which is housed in a Soho vault, contains many wonderful pieces: Lowry, Spencer, Sickert, wars at sea, viceroys, Highland mountains, English pastures, etc. But Mandelson ignored all these and went for a series of monochrome prints made by Chris Orr in the early 1970s. The one that achieved a brief celebrity shows a man staring out from a hotel-room balcony, while inside the room itself a woman is lying on the bed and looking at her vagina in a long mirror. A gondola is moored below the balcony. The title is Deaf in Venice. By itself, a picture of no easily discernible meaning. Vagina apart, it could almost be a Giles cartoon that had somehow got the wrong punchline.

What made it exciting for journalists, and unusual for contemporary art, is that meaning could be deduced pretty easily from the title of the series: "Chris Orr's John Ruskin". The ten prints make up a pictorial biography of the famous Victorian aesthete and critic. He is the man on the balcony of the Venetian hotel. The woman on the bed is his wife, Effie Gray.

Famously, the marriage was never consummated. In the Venice print, Ruskin is turning his back against sex and his wife's entreaties (originally, Orr intended to call it Come and see my pussy). Given Mandelson's own sexuality, though that knowledge was not then widespread, any amateur psychologist could interpret Mandelson's liking for the prints as the result of self-identification.

This made me uneasy at the time, not about Mandelson but about myself. I also like the work of Chris Orr and over the past 20 years have acquired a few of his prints. What did they say about me? There were some obvious answers: like me, Orr grew up in the 1950s; like me, he has a fondness for ships and railway locomotives; he often draws and paints these things and his pictures are fun. But they are also, it has to be said, very odd and faintly alarming. Human incidents - incipient disaster, sexual encounter - often crowd every corner.

You can trace all kinds of influence, from George Grosz through Heath- Robinson to the Eagle comic and Noddy, but it's hard to place him in any genre or category. All that can be safely said is that only England - a postwar England of kiss-me-quick hats and boy hobbyists - could have produced him.

Orr has been making and selling pictures for a living since he left the Royal College of Art in 1967. He's a Royal Academician and last year was appointed the Royal College's Professor of Printmaking.

Earlier this year he asked me to write an introduction to a book that accompanies his latest collection, which goes under the name of "Happy Days" and includes pictures of funfairs and seaside excursions.

"Write about Tanby," he said, which is the picture reproduced on this page, though without the enchantment of its colour.

And so I studied it, for longer, perhaps, than I should have.

Tanby is a collage of pieces cut from children's books of 40 and more years ago, and the immediate impression is of the kind of idealised England that can be found to perfection in the stories of Thomas the Tank Engine. Orr, however, has twisted things by over-etching the lithograph. Two women looked frightened. Geese hiss at a dog. When the train starts from the station, it may run into a cow.

What does it all mean? Piece by piece, I haven't a clue. I doubt that Orr himself knows. This is rather more opaque than Ruskin and vaginas. But it's probably reasonable to conclude, without tedious over-interpretation and the help of Dr Spock, that strong currents of anxiety and repression run beneath the surface of its Fifties innocence.

Orr himself stresses that his pictures aren't nostalgia. "I spent my youth in the 1950s," he says.

"Like many people who write or paint, the older I get the more I find myself drawing from the well of that experience - the time when you are most receptive and most vulnerable."

In this way, his pictures encapsulate a recovered memory - the enthusiasms, worries and bawdy fantasies of the young adolescent male. Or so I think: how else to explain the locomotives, fishnet stockings, big breasts and tall glasses of ice-cream which crop up so regularly in his work?

Which returns us to Peter Mandelson. Thanks to Donald Macintyre's biography, we now know that he first encountered Chris Orr's pictures long before he came to decorate his office.

His father, Tony Mandelson, gave him a print from the Ruskin series when he was still a schoolboy in 1972. It hung - still hangs, according to Macintyre - above Peter's old desk in Hampstead Garden Suburb.

The print shows an earlier stage in Orr's imaginary version of Ruskin's life. He seems to be twisting in agony, or ecstasy, on the bed of a Swiss hotel.

A pillow is flying through the air. His pyjama trousers suggest an erection. "Erotic younggirl thoughts", according to the catalogue notes, "smile enigmatically from the cupboard". Meanwhile, in the next room, his parents have been woken by the noise. Was that John? is the title of the picture.

I agree: an odd - perhaps unnecessarily pointed - gift for a schoolboy. But, thinking of the strange detail that lurks in the Orr pictures on my own wall, I make no conjecture. Safest, as usual, to blame the parents.

DOES ANYONE, apart from those who profit by their manufacture, still insist on believing that violent films and video games have no effect on human behaviour? One of the most persuasive arguments I've ever read for censorship has appeared in The New York Times, prompted by the slaughter of pupils by fellow-pupils at the school in Littleton, Colorado. The piece quotes a West Point professor and former US army officer, Dave Grossman, who has written a book about how American troops in the Vietnam War were taught to kill and to make split-second distinctions between enemies and friends in battle.

The techniques - roughly similar to those of video-games - increased the "firing rates" of US soldiers to as much as 95 per cent from the 15 to 20 per cent average of the Second World War; meaning that many more soldiers had been made willing or able to fire their weapons in an encounter.

According to Grossman, the new, "hyper-real" video games simulate "operant conditioning firing ranges with pop-up targets and immediate feedback, just like those used to train soldiers in modern armies". The two boys who killed their schoolmates in Littleton were highly skilled players of such a game, called Doom.

At an earlier school massacre, in Paducah, Kentucky, the 14-year-old assassin, Michael Carneal, had never fired a pistol before he stole one that day - but with eight shots he hit eight people and killed three of them. According to Grossman, the average US policeman, placed in a similar situation, can manage only one hit in five shots. "When Michael Carneal was shooting," Grossman said, "he simply fired one shot at everything that popped up on his screen."

Game-war video games reward speed and aggression. The connection between them and adolescent massacrists - even if only one of skill and not motive - is surely undeniable.

ON TUESDAY a journalist came to see me from Le Monde in Paris. There had been some disruption to the Eurostar service; strikes in Paris for the implementation of a 35-hour week. It happened all the time, she said, a stoppage here and a demonstration there. Parisian taxi-drivers carry daily lists of where they're likely to occur.

We had a nice lunch and talked about Le Monde. French journalists aren't paid nearly as much as those in London. What about holidays?

"Nine weeks," she said. "Or rather nine weeks plus another sixteen days, the sixteen days to compensate for the fact that it's not possible to restrict journalists to a 35-hour week."

France can't carry on like that, can it - not in the new global capitalism, not in the long run. I guess not, but in the meantime who couldn't be envious? And, as Mr Keynes observed, in the long run we're all dead.