Mary Wakefield

This morning as I cycled through Covent Garden, Melanie Phillips nearly killed me. Here's how: I often jump red lights in London on my bike. I quite see how irritating it is, but it just feels safer to be in front of the buses. This time though, as I was about to sidle through a red, I remembered that last week in her excellent blog, Melanie accused light jumping cyclists of being "sunk in a pit of moral blackness."  The force of her rhetoric, her obvious anguish affected me so I held firm and waited. Red, amber, green: I set off. A second later, a taxi on my right swung left straight into my front tyre. The bike fell over, the taxi fled without stopping to see if I was alive. Had I been a foot or so further forward, I'd have been toast. What's the moral here?

Come on Londoners – it’s judgement day! Now that the new designs for the Fourth Plinth are on display, I think it’s time for us all to have our shout about Thomas Schutte’s Model for a Hotel – that stack of neon plexiglass, to the north-west of Nelson’s column.  Well – here’s my shout anyway: I think it’s a disgrace. Ken told us it would ‘sparkle through the months of winter and lift Londoners' spirits’. Cobblers. It sends my spirits creeping right down into my boots. Against anything but a bright blue sky, the acid yellow looks grubby and the poor thing is far, far too small for such a grand position.

Last Tuesday at nightfall, as the servants of democracy fled SW1, a young Somali woman stood spotlit on a stage in Westminster. Behind her was the illuminated logo for the Centre for Social Cohesion: a white hand reaching down across England to help a brown one up; in front, an audience of some of Britain’s biggest brains — politicians, editors, academics. She drew her shawl a little closer round her shoulders, looked up and said: ‘We are not at war with “terror”, that would make no sense.’ ‘Hear, hear,’ said a voice at the back. ‘Terror is just a tactic used by Islam,’ she continued. ‘We are actually at war, not just with Islamism, but with Islam itself.’ Out in the dark began a great wobbling of heads.

A light rain drifts down over Kintbury village, blurring the surface of the Kennet and Avon canal. It gleams on the railway tracks, pools into fat drops under the roof of the station shelter on the London-bound platform and drips on to Robert Harris’s new suede shoes. Look, I say again, please don’t wait. I’ll be fine. You’ve been more than kind enough already. ‘No, no.’ Harris says firmly. ‘I’ll see you on to the train. I hope you’re not too cold, though.’ This is advanced niceness of a sort you don’t find very often.

6.57 a.m. I wake up three minutes before the alarm is due to go off, aware that I have slept badly: dipping in and out of consciousness. All night I’ve been fretting, imagining the various ways in which I might kill myself on the mountain today. I am not a good skier. I often fall over and sometimes, in deep snow, become cast like a sheep, wedged, unable to rise. If frightened I freeze, like a rabbit. Cousin Peter, my septuagenarian ski-guru, says that I’m finally ready to come ski-touring off-piste with him and his guide, Fred. I feel sick. I want to stay in the chalet and sketch, or make raclette. 7.30 a.m. Outside, the French Alps are still in shadow but the sky is brightening. Plasters, long socks, salopettes.

I’m tempted, just for a second, to feel sorry for Clarissa Dickson Wright. There she is, with her back to me, 15 feet away, at a table in Valvona & Crolla — a refined little deli/café full of focaccia and Parmigiano Reggiano tucked in beside the lager shops on Edinburgh’s Leith Walk. There she sits, waiting for me: the last of the Two Fat Ladies, all alone: no fat husband to cook cakes for, no fat children to lick the icing from the bowl. I’ve read her memoirs, so I know that she’s been through the mill: alcoholism, homelessness, the death by drink of the love of her life. But I also know, as I begin my approach, that to pity Clarissa would be idiotic.