Entry 14:

Dear Sarah,

Please don't automatically assume that I have a hangover just because I drink more than I should. It is one of the advantages of advancing years that you don't get hangovers very easily. I feel fine, as a matter of fact, but I wish I were with you at the Dome, since this is such a nice day. Instead, I have been invited to take a trip tomorrow on London's other great millennium structure, the giant Ferris wheel beside the Thames known as the London Eye. This should be fun, if the weather is clear, for you are supposed to get the best ever view of the British capital from the top of the wheel as it rotates. Views of London, though, tend to be disappointing. Its buildings are mainly low, and there are relatively few prominent landmarks to admire. The most pleasurable sights in London are to be found in nooks and corners on the ground.

Nevertheless, the London Eye has captured the public's imagination in a way that the Dome hasn't begun to. It is a good old-fashioned fairground attraction of the type people can understand, whereas the Dome is resented not only for its enormous cost--money that many people feel would have been better spent on cutting hospital waiting lists--but also for the government's priggish insistence that it should be educational and as unlike Disneyland as possible. This has led to disappointingly low visitor attendances and the recent replacement of its chief executive by a French manager of--wait for it--Disneyland Paris. But I have yet to go to it, and I impatiently await your impressions.

Did you notice that practically all the national newspapers, with just a couple of exceptions, published a photograph of Victoria Beckham, better known as Posh Spice, on their front pages this morning? Posh Spice, one of the Spice Girls, is married to a famous British footballer, David Beckham, and she has taken the place of Princess Diana as the person whose picture can be guaranteed to sell newspapers. It is not immediately obvious to me why this should be so. She is quite pretty in a wiry, bony sort of way, and her husband is a good-looking sports hero. But she is notably lacking in class. Nevertheless, she is at the moment the unchallenged queen of the celebrity culture. What was Britain's leading celebrity magazine, Hello!, has just fallen behind its younger rival, OK!, because OK! paid 1.6 million dollars last summer for exclusive photographs of David and Victoria's wedding.

Hello!, in revenge, has managed to get the golden couple on its cover this week, together with several pages of dreamy love pictures inside, taken by Annie Leibovitz. I was talking to the publisher of Hello! this morning, and she said that the Beckhams' secret was not merely that they were young, attractive, and successful but also that they practice good works. The public, to its credit, likes its glamour heroes to do that, but as long as it doesn't involve any sacrifice of glamour. A cover of Princess Diana could almost always be guaranteed to sell copies, but an issue of Hello! sold very badly when she was portrayed on its cover wearing a helmet, a visor, and a lead apron while campaigning against landmines in Angola.

One paper that didn't carry a front-page picture of Victoria as she modeled for one of the London fashion shows was the Daily Telegraph, which instead had a photograph of a Labor member of Parliament called Julia Drown with her baby, Harvey. Ms Drown wrote to the man who administers the House of Commons to ask if she could bring her baby there if she couldn't get a babysitter. The answer from the sergeant-at-arms was that she shouldn't take Harvey into the debating chamber or the Commons tea room--only into the Lady Members' Room or the Families' Room. He also said that there were diaper-changing facilities in "the disabled lavatory." You, as a young mother and a feminist, what do you think of that?

I'm putting fewer "x"s on the bottom this time, but don't read anything personal into it. A reader has been complaining.

Alexander xxxx