Spectator peregrinations

Whatever happened to former Liberal pink elephant Christopher Mayhew? I got up very early one morning (9.30 am) last week and found him chairing an international conference of the Richmond Fellowship for mental welfare and rehabilitation at London University.

"Well I'm still Liberal member for Bath," he started to tell me, "I mean candidate, you're quite right, a bit different. I've been writing a book on the Middle East and I'm doing a television play — about mental welfare — which is what I did last time I was in the political wilderness. See you afterwards," he said, getting up on to his new platform.

Other speakers included Lord Wolfenden, shadow Health Minister Norman Fowler and a host of international psychiatric experts. One thing I've learned about mental illness is that it is infectious. Too much exposure to intense psychiatric communication and you go round the twist.

A good example of this occurred at the end of one session. All the delegates were getting into three buses to go to a party at Goldsmith's Hall in the City where they were to meet Princess Alexandra, patron of the Richmond Fellowship. As I was on a bicycle and it was snowing they warned me that Princess Alexandra wasn't going to be there. But they didn't tell the others because they had come from America and the Commonwealth. Meeting Princess Alexandra was the highlight of their tour and they wouldn't go to the Goldsmith's Hall if they knew.

I was discussing the finer points of madness with Dr David Clark, a Cambridge psychiatrist, in the Goldsmith's Hall, when Mr Angus Ogilvy,

a substitute, turned up. Dr Clark said that if we went and stood by the small white table under the chandelier at the end of the room we would be introduced to Mr Ogilvy. We did, and in due course we were.

Feeling the first twinges of lunacy, I pedalled back to the West End without pursuing the question of Mr Mayhew in the wilderness.

Here I found Princess Margaret, among others, at the Roy Miles Gallery in Duke Street, Also there was the grotesquely over-educated Norman St John-Stevas. An aesthetic lackey of the former arts minister said, "I wish I had your natural talents." To which the Oxford and Cambridge talking Blue replied, "I wish I had some unnatural ones." I hope I misunderstood this quip. Who does he think he is?

Wintour cheer

Evening Standard bearer Richard Compton Miller told me at this party that the 'Peregrinations' column is the only thing in recent years which has brought a smile to the face of his morose editor, Charles Wintour (origin of the phrase "Long is the Wintour of our discontent"). Indeed he is believed secretly to have removed his glasses and laughed his head off.

Leaving this exhibition, I forget what the pictures where, I thought that Lord Dufferin and Ava, with his Irish and Guinness connections, might be going in the same direction as I was — to a Byron concert given by the Irish Georgian Society at Burlington House. He wasn't. The only Guinnesses in the Academy were Lord Moyne and his daughter, Tamsy, who promised to draw a different peregrine for this page.

John Murray, Byron's publisher, was wearing a gaudy tartan dinner jacket and I met Princess Margaret's mother-in-law, Lady Rosse, who is worried that if her second son, Lord Oxmantown, moves to Kabul, her grandchildren will have to be educated in Afghanistan.

Seeing the encyclopaedic Peter Townend, former editor of Burke's Peerage, propped up in a corner, I went over to ask him who all the other people were. But he had been at the previous gathering and it had been a hard day. "The Countess of ... something or other," he said sliding down the pillar he was leaning against, towards the floor.

It was snowing again and I had forgotten where I left the bicycle.

Ascot coup

The Queen, Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother, whose horses, Sunyboy and Game Spirit, won two of the races on Sardan Day at Ascot last Thursday, sponsored by Slough furniture distributor Bruce Peskin, must think themselves lucky they did not have to stuff a glass-top table and a set of metal swivel chairs into their limousine before they went home to Windsor. The £312 dining-room suite was illustrated on the back of their racecard. It was won by R. J. V. Boulstridge who came with a coach party and got all the winners. He put it all on the bus and went back to Willenhall, Staffordshire, where he has just bought a new house.

Yoghourt

An eccentric peer, whom I don't want to embarrass, who likes yoghourt for breakfast, tells me he can't get the stuff in the Carlton Club. So when he leaves his flat in the Albany, Piccadilly, each morning he walks down to Chubbies sandwich bar in Crown Passage, the narrow alleyway between King Street and Pall Mall, to buy a paper and a yoghourt before having breakfast in his club. When asked, "You don't actually eat it in St James's Street, do

you?" he says, "Well, what else am I supposed to do with it?"

Memories of Zena

Sir John Gielgud was too nervous to deliver the address at Zena Dare's memorial service at St James's Church, Piccadilly, on Friday. He is so involved with rehearsals for his new Pinter play, No Man's Land, that he said he would almost certainly mix up his lines. So Robert Flemyng did it instead. I was nervous when I first met Zena Dare. Aged twelve I had been brought over from Ireland to be installed in an English public school. On my first night in England I was taken by parents to see My Fair Lady and to dinner afterwards with Mrs Higgins. Dressed in her Ascot outfit by Cecil Beaton she walked round the dressing rooms asking Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews, Stanley Holloway and the others to sign my programme.

Waterford glass

Announcing the Waterford Crystal Mile, the Waterford Rose Bowl Stakes, and the Waterford Candelabra Stakes, prize money totalling £10,000, to be run at Goodwood in August, Lord March, who owns the place, was a little goggle-eyed. "It's nice to see a prize that is elegant and useful." When I asked Lord March if he collected Waterford glass in his muchburgled stately home he said, "I'm afraid it's one thing we haven't got." 1 trust that Senator Patrick McGrath, horse owner and chairman of the company, will not leave Lord March begging a bowl for long.

Culture

At a party given by Sir William Collins, publisher, the eminently civilised Lord Goodman made an impassioned speech about the national disregard for cultural values. It is really quite frightening, he said, how far they have been transformed by greedy economists, even in the last ten years. I would like to suggest that we have a full-frontal nude of Lord Goodman, or even a profile, in the National Portrait Gallery to remind us that mankind has not really changed all that much. Although that could be quite frightening.

Wordsmiths

Guardian writer Mark Arnold Forster used the phrase, "I would deeply like to know," when asking a question about North Sea fishing at a press conference last week. I would like to put him on a pedestal with Derek Sumpter, news editor of the Sunday Telegraph who once told me, "Your days are severely numbered."

Satied

Continuing my investigation into obscure art forms that I don't understand (you will remember last week's four-hour still film) I have been to an exhibition-concert-play — "an art without distracting subject matter" — by Erik Satie, the French composer-playwright who died fifty years ago. I hestitate to send this one up because hundreds of his followers packed the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the more fervent ones had hammers sticking out of their breast pockets — to emulate M. Satie, a nervous mystic who always carried a hammer for his own protection. (You can see the original hammer, its handle broken, in a glass case at the ICA in the Mall.)

Favourite thing

Peregrine Worsthorne, who has nothing to do with this column, writes in Punch, "Whenever my fingers stray to my middle and the familiar object is not there to be touched, I feel a shock of deprivation and anxiety, scarcely less acute than the panic caused by a missing wallet." He is, of course, describing his watch-chain.

Any time, baby

Unsophisticated graffiti in Et Vino's gents' loo: underneath "Thatcher for PM," Nigel Dempster, an Australian, has written "Why not a.m?"

Peregrine