Mary Wakefield

Sir Crispin Tickell tells Mary Wakefield that George Bush’s ‘illegal’ war has brought shame on us all I’m on the telephone, talking to the editor of this magazine, trawling for last-minute background information, when Sir Crispin Tickell, GCMG, KCVO, our former ambassador to the UN, appears in the doorway. He looks alert, beaky, sleek, like a smallish, zoo-kept hawk. ‘Well, his middle name is Cervantes, does that help?’ says the voice in my ear. ‘Sorry!’ I mouth at Sir Crispin. Cup of tea, Sir Crispin? Coffee? Neither.

Last Saturday must have been a difficult day for St Paul. His cathedral, still covered in patches of scaffolding like pins supporting badly broken legs, was teeming, inside and out, with women in dog collars. In the crypt, an hour before the grand celebration of the tenth anniversary of the ordination of women to the priesthood, there were women priests of every description: fifty-something tiggywinkles with thick NHS spectacles; red-cheeked 30-year-olds, their clerical collars just visible above green fleeces; Laura Ashley skirts and sensible slip-ons mixed with smart black trouser suits and high heels.

Mary Wakefield meets Nigella Lawson and finds that she is friendly, confident, beautiful — but nervous with it In a window-seat at the far end of the bar in the Rib Room of the Carlton Tower Hotel, Nigella Lawson, dressed in black, sits waiting for me. The lighting is mellow, the seats leather and her eyes modestly downcast. If she were auditioning for the part of Anna Karenina, there would be no contest. It seems a great waste that instead of Vronsky, she gets me, struggling to free myself from my anorak. We shake hands over the salted cashew nuts and get off to a rocky start. ‘I’m not quite sure why I’m doing this interview,’ she says. If I wasn’t already so fascinated I might be a little hurt, but Nigella, close-up, is riveting.

A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend, a man who has more postgraduate degrees than I have GCSEs. The subject of Darwinism came up. ‘Actually,’ he said, raising his eyebrows, ‘I don’t believe in evolution.’ I reacted with incredulity: ‘Don’t be so bloody daft.’ ‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘Many scientists admit that the theory of evolution is in trouble these days. There are too many things it can’t explain.’ ‘Like what?’ ‘The gap in the fossil record.’ ‘Oh, that old chestnut!’ My desire to scorn was impeded only by a gap in my knowledge more glaring than that in the fossil record itself.

There is a joke in the Jewish community about a typical Jewish mother who travels to a remote Buddhist temple in Nepal. Eventually granted an audience with the revered guru there, she says just three words: 'Sheldon, come home.' The first trickle of Jews began to convert to Buddhism about 50 years ago. The beat poet Allen Ginsberg was among them, and wrote, 'Born in this world/ you got to suffer/ everything changes/ you got no soul.' By the 1970s, there were enough Jewish Buddhists for Ginsberg's guru, Chogyan Trungpa, to talk about forming the Oy Vey school of Meditation. Now Jewish Buddhists – or Jubus – are the largest group of converts in the West, with all the hallmarks of an established movement.

Don't worry,' said our guide, Niels Bryan-Low, his eyes bright with malice, 'the only time a wild boar is really dangerous is if you get between a mother and her baby.' A few minutes later, crunching across a patch of orange ferns, there was blur of movement to our right. Niels froze, sniper-style, and we turned to see a terrier-sized wild boarlet, striped dark brown and fawn, zigzagging towards us through the undergrowth. 'Shit,' said Niels, cocking his rifle. 'Where's the mum?' Within seconds, I had hauled myself up into a fork of the only sapling in sight, leaving Niels and my boyfriend to die below. My left foot, balanced upon a slender branch, trembled pathetically.

Right! You've got 40 minutes,' says Nick Wood, Iain Duncan Smith's spin doctor, in the manner of a game-show host. We are sitting round a table in IDS's office. Nick has a large glass of red wine in his hand and I have water. Iain can't have a drink, I soon realise, because it would end up all over the wall after one of his emphatic hand gestures. It has been a good week for IDS, perhaps his best since becoming leader of the opposition. Crispin Blunt may have plunged his dagger, but it turned out to have a rubber blade. The Tories gained more than 600 seats in the council elections, the Liberals failed to break through, and Labour did abysmally. Now is the time for the Tory leader to rout his internal critics, and take the fire into the enemy camp.

Don't be silly,' said my learned Tory friend Bruce, leaning across a plate of foie gras and peering at me over the top of his glasses. 'It doesn't matter whether they find any weapons of mass destruction; the war on Iraq was justified because it was fun. Our boys were getting bored; they needed a bit of a gallop.' It looked, from the newspaper photographs, as though Bruce might be right. Covered in tribal face-paint and with skulls daubed on their helmets, our boys and America's went whooping off in their tanks and planes. Cities fell, civilians looted, and patriots like Bruce knocked back a few bottles of port in celebration. What happens to the heroes when they come home is a matter of less interest to military enthusiasts.

I spent Tuesday evening watching Ashley, a 15-year-old blonde girl from Oklahoma, flirt with a British boy called PJ. 'Wanna see some photos of me?' asked Ashley. PJ grinned. 'I think you'll like them, they're hot,' said Ashley, and winked. A boy called Ghetto, whom neither of them had met before, interrupted the conversation. 'Hello, sir,' he began. 'Does anybody want to buy a dildo?' Kitty69 responded immediately: 'Check out the action on my live teen webcam!' The Yahoo chat room for teenagers is one of the oddest places I've ever been. Boys pick up girls within seconds of meeting, and retire to 'private rooms' to talk dirty. PJ and Ashley soon disappeared to check out her webcam, a small video camera that transmits live footage of its owner, usually naked, over the Internet.

I find it difficult to remember, in retrospect, why I thought it would impress Ranulph Fiennes - a man who has crossed the Antarctic unaided and who sawed the ends off his own, frostbitten fingers - if I arrived to interview him on a bicycle. I could have gone by cab and been waiting calmly in the foyer of the Lanesborough Hotel by 8 a.m. Instead, I pitch up at 8.15 with black particles of diesel exhaust stuck to my puce face. 'Sorry I'm late, I came by bicycle,' I explain to a tall, middle-aged man with a fine-boned, urgent-looking face like a pencil sketch. Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, Bt, OBE stares at me with a polite but total lack of interest. As we sit across the breakfast table from each other, previous articles about him suddenly make sense.

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.

After Wednesday’s Tube strike, most Londoners will have decided again that the only solution is a bicycle. But there’s a dark side to cycling in the city. Since I bought my first bike a year or so ago I have been astonished by the outbursts of spittle-flecked fury pedestrians unleash upon cyclists. Any minor deviation from the letter of the law — a quick pedal on the pavement, a whizz through Hyde Park — induces instant Tourette’s syndrome in passers-by: ‘You stupid f—–ing cow! Get off your f—–ing bike!’ etc., etc., followed by a furious rant about how, literally, lethal bicycles are.