Tales of the City: Watching the action on the centre court

Court No 1 at the Old Bailey is becoming the drop-in entertainment centre of London. Sitting in the court where Paul Burrell is defending himself against accusations that he stole 310 items from the Princess of Wales's Kensington Palace apartment is the most riveting experience. It's not just because of the revelations that have been leaking out for a week – Mr Burrell's conspiracy theories about the people who wanted "to erase the princess from history", the mysterious "item of jewellery" that was so sensitive it could not be mentioned aloud in court, the curious arrangements between the princess and her butler for the disposal of unwanted frocks, the pathetic cash float she kept to pay for cinema visits and trips to the shops – this is all terrific stuff, but you need to be there as well.

The atmosphere of this plainly furnished star chamber, with its immense round skylight, is charged with intrigue. Dominick Dunne from Vanity Fair, the world's most superior gossip writer, scribbles left-handed in his special long, skinny notebooks. Nicholas Witchell, the BBC's royal watcher, sits poised to identify anything, any tiny detail, he hasn't heard before. There's something very eloquent about the back of Mr Burrell's pink neck, with its immaculate short-back-and-sides and the half-inch of lilac shirt-collar above his immaculate grey suit, that re- defines the word "imperturbable". There's a quality of outraged Edwardian dignity about the stillness of his butler's cranium and his constant Upstairs, Downstairs references to his "pantry" at the palace.

And what a pantry! Foolishly, I used to think pantries were places you kept the cheese, eggs and cold roast lamb. Instead, they appear to be where you keep jewellery, photographic portraits, Cartier cutlery, watercolour paintings, writing desks, boxes of handkerchiefs, everything except the royal kitchen sink which, for all I know, may be in the pantry already. The mad profusion of stuff that passed briefly through the princess's hands before being discarded, handed on to Burrell and/or his wife and children, or ordered to be thrown away. The picture of the princess that's emerging is of an imperious Alice in Wonderland, stamping her foot in dislike at the ormolu clocks so kindly sent, saying one of her thousand variants of "Don't like that, get rid of it" as the incessant tide of unwanted gifts flowed through her life. Like it. Don't like it. Hate it. Get rid of it. Every day, a radical clearout of the things that appeared the day before. Every day, a radical makeover of her new belongings. It sounds completely exhausting.

But the real excitement at this stage of this trial isn't the ownership of crocodile handbags and monogrammed lighters. It's the cat-and-mouse exchanges between the defence counsel, Lord Carlile, and anyone he has in his sights. I am no stranger to courts of law in fiction and on TV. I can appreciate the airy rhetoric of Rumpole and Kavanagh, Perry Mason and Portia like everyone else. But the game in Court No 1 is to identify where, when Lord Carlile is on his feet, the proliferating thickets of argumentation and enquiry are leading. He began his cross-examination of DS Roger Milburn with a tenacious series of enquiries about whether or not the officers who came to arrest Burrell on 18 January 2001 were familiar with the local cops in Cheshire, then followed it up by seeking to establish, as a matter of ferocious urgency, whether or not the police were carrying torches. The secret of his success as an advocate is to make these apparently mild enquiries about apparently small details seem a) earthshakingly important and b) slightly threatening. The effect is Pinteresque. One is reminded of the scene in The Birthday Party, when the brace of interrogators demand to know "Who watered the wicket at Melbourne?" and "What about the Albigensian heresy?". One feels that when the Day of Judgement arrives, and you're trying to assure the recording angel of your fitness for Paradise, someone like his lordship will be around to say, "What do you mean, you didn't know?" How the torches etc relate to the Burrell possession issue, God only knows. But mark my words, this merciless brief is one of the great performances showing outside the West End.

How a Dutch poet made me long for the squeegee merchant

If you were mad enough to drive through the centre of Oxford in the last few days, you may have chanced, somewhere around the Carfax junction, upon the happy sight of a Dutch lady pedestrian driving motorists into a frenzy. Her name is Sonja Kerkhoff, she's from Leiden in the Netherlands, and she has been reciting poetry at people in cars when they get stuck at the lights, unable to proceed along the pedestrianised Cornmarket or turn right down the High Street.

She wasn't quoting any poems actually about traffic jams (there aren't many of them, although Robert Lowell's "Everywhere/ giant finned cars nose forward like fish..." leaps to mind), but reading poetic indictments of Britain's colonial past. It is, you will agree, a curious idea. The lovely Ms Kerkhoff is one of six artists from Leiden (which is twinned with Oxford) invited on an exchange visit to the dreaming spires. Her poetry-traffic-lights interface is her new conceptual extravaganza, entitled Colonising Oxford, and you could see how it might cause trouble. It's one thing having a sneering roughneck squeegeeing your windscreen at the lights. It's a lot worse having somebody recite poetry in your ear when you're not in the mood for, say, Longfellow's Hiawatha. But there's nothing to beat having a Dutch bien-pensant telling us off for once having had an empire (has she forgotten the voortrekkers in South Africa? Or that New York started off as New Amsterdam?) just when your engine is overheating and your son is playing Feeder at nosebleed volume. Anyone would be forgiven for belabouring her about the head with her own clogs. But I see the city council has decided she's too annoying, and banned her from reciting. "We were concerned for her safety," a councillor said. "People are frightfully irate around there. It's a busy corner." Who says poetry makes nothing happen?

Manners maketh nu-metal woman

A letter of complaint arrives on Conqueror vellum writing paper, immaculately laid out and word-processed, with a polite "Yours sincerely" at the end. What's unusual is the identity of the sender, a Ms Allie Nicholson. Because in last week's item about Croydon and its doomed attempt to storm the movie world, I mentioned "all the nu-metal kids hanging around outside HMV, looking for someone to mug". And the letter starts off, bluntly: "I live in Croydon. I also happen to be a 'nu-metal kid' that hangs around outside HMV. As far as I know, none of the kids in the Croydon area that are into nu-metal mug people. You are getting us mixed up with another culture that we want as little as possible to do with... Maybe next time you are in the Croydon area you should drop by HMV and actually talk to us."

My apologies to Ms Nicholson for getting it wrong (my report was partly based on south-London hearsay). And I must ask: can Croydon's reputation for violent, wretched, urban soullessness survive, when it has such cool, articulate and charming citizens hanging out on its streets?

A rotten slur

The visit of John Lydon (formerly Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols) to BBC Radio 2 to present a progamme about his beloved Alice Cooper has been abused in the right-wing press as evidence that the staring-eyed loon has joined the establishment. I don't believe a word of it. Mr Lydon is obviously after his own easy-listenin' show, where he can offer slightly adjusted cover versions of relaxed-crooner classics: not just Frank Ifield's "I Remember You, You C***", with which his name has long been linked, but maybe Andy Williams's "(I Wish you Drowned in) Moon River", Perry Como's "Bella F***ing Notte" and Dean Martin's "Little Ol' Piss Artist Me".