Diary

The What-is-the-World-Coming-to? Department this week contains gloomy reading from the London Library's Annual Report about thieving members (and unprecedented security arrangements), but there is some reassuring news that England is still England.

"The library's memory is long," records the Librarian, "but not so long as to have kept it in mind that a volume of Lord Albemarle's Memoirs of Rockingham and his Contemporaries, long since replaced, was still in orbit. Shortly after publication in 1852, it had been taken out by a nobleman. Last summer, during a shelf-check of a country house library in Yorkshire, it came to light and some 140 years later the borrower's descendants returned it to St James's Square with due apologies."

"Have you seen it before?" asked the tenant of my affections last Wednesday, bouncing excitedly at having unexpectedly secured us tickets for the English National Opera's Carmen. Slightly abashed, I admitted that the nearest I'd got had been the movie version of Oscar Hammerstein's all-black Carmen Jones, [in which the love-crazed, tragic Don Jose - played by Harry Belafonte - was transmogrified into

a GI].

"Now none of your hoity-toitiness," I warned. "Carmen Jones was wonderful. I still remember it vividly." So I was a bit upset when I looked it up in my guide to Hollywood musicals and saw the film described as a "torrid musical melodrama" full of "two-dimensional stereotypes ... always at odds with the glorious music". However, I was only 10 when I saw it, so perhaps I can be forgiven such a lapse of taste.

The ENO Carmen was glorious, although Don Jose was small and perfectly formed rather than hunkish, and I kept expecting the mid-nineteenth century Spaniards to break into such Hammerstein lyrics as "Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum". It was in the middle of the night that it suddenly came to me that the time is ripe for a remake of Carmen Jones and that OJ Simpson is available.

A transatlantic mole faxed me an invitation issued by the Oxford Society of Washington ("This outpost of Oxford University in the nation's capital") to a sherry reception and afternoon tea in honour of the "most brilliant and courageous Irish historian of his generation" - my friend Roy Foster, Professor of Irish History at Oxford - at the Willard Inter-Continental Hotel next Saturday. The charge for the sherry reception and afternoon tea is $25.50 per person, which includes a sherry and mineral water bar and a beautiful and delicious three-course (seated and served) "Afternoon Tea Meal", during which "Oxonians can expect a memorable visit and speech". I served my Oxbridge time in Cambridge, where the dons were certainly no strangers to gluttony, but even at the sybaritic Peterhouse, where Michael Portillo acquired his winning ways, they did not go in for sherry and three-course teas at 2.30pm.

I know that Hampstead is a foreign country and they do things differently there, but because it's in London and a handful of my best friends live there I forget its essential otherness. Yesterday morning, recollecting (in whatever is the hangover equivalent of tranquillity) the argument at a dinner there between me and my Gucci-socialist host, I recalled the conversation with my Hampstead friends Jill and Lewis which best sums up the place:

"Why, oh why, do you live in W35 or wherever it is?" asked Lewis one day. "Come and live near us."

"I don't want to," I whinged. "I like living among real people."

"Perhaps, darling," snapped Jill, who is a licensed Hampstead bolshie, "when Ruth comes out of her house in the morning she doesn't necessarily want to bump into three psychoanalysts and a lady novelist."

Alan Howarth has been inspirational. George Hummer provided the clerihew:

Alan Howarth

New Labour woweth

In the home of the Bard of Avon

His choice is craven

And here are two shots at what Mike Bradshaw describes as a "pterrordactyl". First Sebastian Robinson:

Sputtering feebly, the

Stratford Conservatives

Learned that their Member had

Shown them the door:

"Tells all the Sundays quite

Undiplomatically -

Treads on our toes while he's

Crossing the Floor."

And then Mike's sombre warning:

Conservative Chairman

Smiling malevolence

Now the majority's

Fallen to five,

Exceedingly doubtful

Stratford chameleon

Crossing the Commons can

Make it alive.

Now for some of your suggestions for the missing lines in the Eurolimerick which begins "Una belle ragazza di Gela/Had a torrid affair with a sailor" and ends "Wie war denn dass fur ein Fehler!".

"Mais son cher matelot/Only sucked her big toe" (John Bailie);

"All of 69 ways/Mais sans capotes anglaises" (Andrew Hayes of the European Public Health Alliance - "in the interests of positive health protection");

"Naci su bebe/A Toulon, sur le quai," (Geoffrey Lintott);

" 'C'est le roulis, mam'selle, du bateau.' 'No un rollo, senor, de linleo?' " (Tony Scoffield).

I drew the names out of my Orangeman's bowler and Tony won, so he gets the prize. Henceforward, when sending me verse written in foreign tongues, please, please send translations. It is a bit much when a linguistic moron is expected to understand even Finnish.