Entry 3:

I feel forgotten no more, thanks to your cheery note with all those kisses on the bottom ("Gosh, I'm glad I got 'em"--Fats Waller). It makes me feel like I've got at least one Valentine card, and I will reciprocate immediately--xxxxxxxxxxxxx. I hope that makes you feel better, too.

You ask if I would "please, please, please" explain why the Sun has three topless women on Page 3 today. Good question. The story was going around about a year ago that the world's best-selling daily tabloid was planning to phase out its famous topless girls because they were embarrassing its publisher, Rupert Murdoch. It never quite happened, for some reason. But the Sun did clean up the captions. These used to be breathtakingly coy and riddled with sexual innuendo. Now they normally consist only of the girl's first name, her age, and where she comes from. Today's picture of a "three-mendous triple treat that's guaranteed to set your heart all a-flutter" is a return to the past. Let's hope it's for Valentine's Day only. What struck me most about the picture was its brutal rejection of the idea that Valentine's Day has anything to do with romantic love. It's no good the Sun's saying that "our terrific trio won't go short of chocs and flowers on Valentine's Day. Just one look at them would make any fella come over all romantic." The message could not be clearer--every British "fella" really prefers three topless girls to one.

The Sun has never accepted that Englishmen are shy and repressed (which we all are, of course). It has found there are more bucks to be made out of portraying us as lusty, red-blooded, and fearless. It seems that Murdoch must have bowed to its professional judgment. Do I read the Sun? Yes, I do, but only because I write a press column for the Daily Telegraph. There is a Fleet Street myth that Sun editors are all scholars of ancient Greek with post-graduate degrees from Oxford, but I find this hard to believe. The headlines of which it is inordinately proud--e.g. "Stick It Up Your Junta" to General Galtieri, the military dictator of Argentina during the Falklands War--have always struck me as more bold than brilliant. I have noted that the Sun has more appeal to sensitive, educated Americans than it does to their British equivalents. I think this may be to do with an American love-hate fascination with excess and vulgarity in the British press, because you don't have it over there in the United States. My wife certainly doesn't read the Sun. I'd be amazed if any women did. It's definitely a man's newspaper, though the Sun would hotly deny that. This being the case, I am surprised you are surprised that it sells so many copies "when it prints these ridiculous photographs."

You make an amusing point about the irritation in the British press that so many of the hijacked Afghans turn out to want to go home. We don't want them here, naturally, but how dare they prefer their miserable, joyless, impoverished country to this other Eden? I read somewhere, though I can't remember where, that many of them changed their minds about wanting to stay in Britain after being informed about the consequences of seeking asylum here. I wonder what they were threatened with. Maybe a lifetime spent in Moreton-in-Marsh. How can you have a town in a marsh? you ask. Well, you can't, but the British have a curious habit of naming places in remembrance of things they have destroyed. The New Covent Garden vegetable market in London is called that, although it is miles away from Covent Garden. The same is true of the Charing Cross Hospital. I thought that possibly there was once a marsh at Moreton, and then they drained it. But the dreary truth will out. "Marsh" is a corruption of "Henmersche." "Mersche" was somehow related to "marc," which was somehow related to "march," meaning a boundary. So it should have been called "Moreton-on-March," but wasn't. Please don't ask me any more about it, especially how the "hen" comes into it.

I hope we can raise the tone of this correspondence tomorrow, but sticking to its present low level, I wonder whether you read the piece in the Sunday People yesterday about the Life Guards captain who tried to steal the queen's knickers? Captain Nick Carrell says the queen caught him in her private apartment rifling through her drawers while he was helping to save her personal possessions from the great fire at Windsor Castle in 1992. "Naughty Nick Carrell was planning to pinch a pair of the royal undies as a cheeky memento for his officers' mess," the newspaper said. "But amazingly, the queen turned a blind eye to their brief encounter." Poor old queen. Even her personal bodyguards show no respect, let alone the tabloids. No wonder she seldom smiles. Can't even an American feel sorry for her?

Alexander xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx