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Osbert Sitwell tells a story in Left hand! Right hand! about visiting a country house and sitting on a hall chair which promptly collapses. 'Don't worry, Osbert,' his hostess tells him, 'it was a very old chair.' Indeed it was, as Sitwell later discovers: Egyptian and about 3,000 years old. Fortunately, more 'very old' objects have survived from ancient Egypt than from any comparable period, because the Egyptians set such store by filling the tombs of their pharaohs with chairs, sculpture, jewellery, wall paintings, gold, alabaster, model boats, board games - anything that might come in handy for the after-life in which they so firmly believed.

Just as some men are attracted only to blondes with long legs, or buxom, curly-haired brunettes, so there are certain architectural features that make my heart beat faster and others that leave me cold. Bay windows can certainly be very handsome, and they let in plenty of light, but they don't carry the same emotional charge as a pair of floor-length windows. The ultimate adrenaline rush, for me, comes from two (or better still, three) sets of French doors on to a terrace with a view of tall, venerable trees beyond. But as with people, so with property: love at first sight can be a dangerous thing. A few years ago I fell in love with a barn in the Dordogne.

They got it wrong last time... It is the tenth anniversary of Black Wednesday, 16 September 1992, and, across the nation, there will be diverse commemoration of that astonishing moment when the pound crashed out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Some may be brooding sorrowfully on the Tory party, which has not since recovered in the polls. Some may want to show a mark of respect to the myriad job losses, the 100,000 destroyed businesses, and the 1.75 million homes which were plunged into negative equity during the calamitous two years of Britain's membership. Here at The Spectator, we thought it right to remind you of all those who clamoured for the pound to join in October 1990, and who heroically pretended that the system was working.

The Saudi ambassador tells Boris Johnson that America is hated and war on Iraq is mad 'No, no,' says the Saudi ambassador, 'this is how you do it. You cannot lift your arm above the shoulder, and you must do it sideways.' He moves alongside, a big man with a faint resemblance to Leon Brittan, and makes a thwacking motion. Meet Ghazi Algosaibi, 62, a poet and author, the Arab world's leading envoy to London, who has recently earned not just a personal rebuke from Jack Straw, but the demands of the Jewish Board of Deputies that he be expelled from the country. Mr Algosaibi recently wrote an ode to a suicide bomber (which prompted the rebuke). In the last two hours, in the lacquered mudZjar comfort of his Curzon Street embassy, he has been fluently denouncing the West.

Mary Wakefield has been getting to grips with the terrifying but comic world of the Daily Mail's Lynda Lee-Potter Lynda Lee-Potter was grinning like a lizard in the top left-hand corner of her page in the Daily Mail last Wednesday. Below her photograph was the headline 'Only one penalty for such evil'. The evil was paedophilia; the penalty was death. As I read on through 'wickedness' and 'sick desires' to 'terror' and 'raw suffering', I had the unnerving feeling that her smile was spreading across her face. Paedophiles make regular appearances in Lee-Potter's column, always surrounded by the same huddle of aging television-show hosts, young actresses, members of the royal family and pop-stars with knighthoods.

Griffin Stone shows how British justice tramples on the rights of fathers and brutally deprives them of access to their offspring I am a member of a club I never wanted to join. I barely knew the club existed until I had become a member. I would love to pull out altogether, but the decision, unfortunately, isn't mine. I see my fellow members as a breed of noble losers, though my self-image doesn't permit me to see myself that way. They are men - yes, it is an overwhelmingly male club, though women have been known to gain entry - who have lost court battles (usually many), personal struggles, money, time, professional standing and peace of mind, yet still fight on because they believe they are right, because they can't give up, they won't let go. I would say many of them are obsessive.