Mea culpa

Taki The mother of my children rang me from Deauville and for probably the first time in her life asked me to retract something I had written. It was about Pal Sarkozy's wife, Christine de Ganay, whom I described last week as the worst of a bad bunch. Well, Alexandra does have a point. I mixed up the cad's wives. The poor de Ganey woman was left penniless with two young children by our pal Pal — and he is still very much with us as I saw a picture of him when his son was crowned at the Elysee. I simply mixed up his various wives and women and chose to call the best the worst. Stupid little Greek boy. This kind of thing happens to those who drink, fornicate (just) and think they know everything because they've been around for so long. My sincere apologies, and, believe you me, it's not some Grabbit & Run hack lawyer who has sent me a threatening letter. Just the old wife asking me to play fair.

Be that as it may, my old boss Lord Black — I love it when the Yanks refer to him as Lord Conrad Black — seems to be doing well. The prosecution began as the Ardennes offensive by my beloved Wehrmacht did, but has now hit a rough patch. They came up with a couple of bullshitters who had been promised an easy time where you can't drop the soap, but, and it's a very big but, if the jury has any sense, they'll throw the case out the window and then comes party time. Conrad reminds me a lot of Richard Nixon. Misunderstood, portrayed as an ambitious anachronism, slapped with ludicrous adjectives by hacks whose copious research only cloaks their prejudices. I have written about Black before, so I will spare you. But I will yet again come back to Nixon.

He visited Moscow in July 1959 as vicepresident to Ike, and at the Sokolniki Park American Exhibition he had the famous contretemps with Nikita Khrushchev over which superpower had the best kitchen. The Yanks won hands down. Uncle Sam had a lock on the contest. An all-mod-con kitchen complete with dishwasher and America's most cherished possession — a huge refrigerator. The Russkies were still hauling ice from the Gulag in order to chill their vodka. Nikita baited Nixon, but my hero held his own. The American refrigerator was light-years ahead of the Soviet Neanderthal contraption.

Switch to Wimbledon two years later. Thomas Lejus, a Moscow university graduate, was the first Soviet to be accepted to the Wimbledon draw after the war. An American friend of mine — whom I cannot name because he is now a very big shot in DC — was also in the draw. He suggested we take Thomas out to lunch and get him to defect. 'Do you know what this will do, if their first player defects?' I agreed, and my friend and I invited Lejus to the Café Royal for lunch once he was out of the tournament.

If memory serves, Lejus passed a round or two, and on the second week the three of us met in Regent Street. After the boring opening pleasantries, D. got to the point. I can actually repeat it word for word: 'Look, Thomas, if you leave the Soviet Union, we will give you a house near Washington which will have a refrigerator, and a Ford convertible with a hard roof, one that retracts even while you're driving .. . ' He made a sign with his hand showing how the roof worked. I remained silent. Then, after a long pause, Thomas answered, 'You mean to tell me that you would like me to leave the land of Pushkin for a refrigerator and a car whose roof retracts while on the road?' D. was nonplussed. Then the penny dropped. Someone had obviously got to Lejus before us. 'Who the f*** is Pushkin?' he demanded. That is when I stepped in. 'Please,' I begged D., let me handle it.'

You can guess the rest. I recited Eugene Onegin to Thomas — after all, Pushkin is the only poet who wrote it first and did what he had written about in real life afterwards — told him how I would have done exactly what the man who was known to be as jealous as Othello and twice as dark did in his particular case. . . but it was no good. He saw us as a bunch of philistines with a capital 'p'. Never mind. Back then I was the most right-wing human being on earth, but I sure got Thomas's point. And it gets worse.

Thirty years later, in the spring of 1991, in Palermo, my old Davis Cup partner and I were playing a veteran tennis tournament when we spotted a very thin, torturedlooking man staring out into space, unaware of his surroundings. 'Thomas?' I asked gently. It was Lejus. It turned out he had walked in on his wife while she was on the saddle with another, and had killed her. Being a Soviet hero, and because of the passions involved, he got only eight years in a tough prison. He told us about it in the way people do when they have renounced all further intimacies of this kind. I was very moved, and tried a Flaubert line. 'The absurd man is the man who never changes.' He gave me that immortal Russian look, one that encompasses all the wisdom and hell those poor Russians have had to learn and endure. I never saw him again.

Payment options were for a seven-day, a one-month or a three-month membership. Vanity and parsimony urged the seven-day deal. Once the photo and witty description of myself were up and running, they said, I'd be immediately deluged with offers from attractive, fascinating women. The more familiar voice of bitter experience, however, made me take the threemonth package.

I borrowed a digital camera and got my boy to photograph me in different shirts. I had an appalling hangover. My eyes were small, my face deathly white, and my smile could have been the work of a conscientious mortician. We finally chose a portrait from the waist up in which there at least appeared to be the flicker of a life-force.

My description of the kind of woman I was looking for I kept brief and, after a lastminute change of strategy, free from sexual innuendo. Most men, I guess, would ideally like to meet a blind nymphomaniac teenage brewery heiress, but on paper it looked crass. All I asked, I decided to say, was that she must be forgiving.

There was also a multiple-choice questionnaire for specifying your prospective partner's age, education, religious beliefs, colour and bank balance. Against all of these I expansively ticked 'any'. The moniker I chose for myself to preserve my anonymity until I was ready was Lady Circumference. Within two minutes of entering my creditcard details, Lady Circumference's photo was online, my stall was set out, and I was open for business.

What happens on this particular online site is that, if another member likes the look of your profile, they send you their own photo and profile, which is stored in your 'admirers' gallery. Every time you log in, you open this gallery, see who's taken a shine to you since you last looked, and send a message to anyone you like the look of.

Several years ago I visited an extraordinary tourist attraction in Palermo, Sicily. In catacombs beneath a Capuchin monastery, the corpses of hundreds of local worthies had been preserved by a combination of the peculiar climatic conditions and a secret embalming technique that had unfortunately died with its last possessor in the 1920s. Row upon row of these worthies, all dressed up in their Sunday best, their teeth, hair and skin still intact, line the dusty walls of the catacombs. Here and there, dusty little groups of them are arranged into grotesque tableaux of domesticity complete with tables, chairs and soft furnishing.

Well, that was what my 'admirers' gallery looked like when I first checked it after a couple of days. Because I'd said in effect that I'd be willing to tackle anybody of any age, I'd unwittingly created quite at stir at the older end of the market. About three quarters of them stated that they wanted to spend the evening curled up in front of a fire with a glass of wine. About half expressed in one way or another a belated willingness to seize the day. Three said they liked dancing in the moonlight. One of these liked swimming naked in the sea also. If I chose her, though, she said, I must be prepared to lie about how we met.

This woman was only ten years older than me, and she was local, so I sent her a friendly message. I said I was new to the site and that she was the first lady I'd contacted. I didn't remotely fancy her. But I'd paid to join this club and I thought I might as well get some sort of a dialogue going with somebody. Almost immediately she sent back: Dear Lady Circumference. You've got a face like a dog's arse. I clicked on your profile by mistake. Sony, darlin'! Love Glad The Inhaler.

My audacious plan to have someone on the back-burner is on the back-burner at the moment.