The most callous case of granny dumping Henley police have ever encountered.

Our second-hand Golf, you see, came with a coloured satnav map in the central console plus a cruder arrow guidance system by the speedometer. Trouble is, they occasionally disagree – Alex’s will say fork left, mine will say fork right – and at such times my arrow system has proved more reliable than her prettier rolling map. That said, during such discrepancies the air turns blue as we debate the choice and it was during one of these shout-ins that I somehow pressed one of the four mystery buttons on the steering wheel and my second-opinion navigation aid was replaced with a screen offering average mpg, estimated arrival time and remaining fuel. So Alex took the wheel and somehow got it back, but every time she passed 53 mph there’d be a warning buzzer and she’d lose it again, finally learning by elimination that in hitting the bottom left mystery button, the trusted guidance arrow returned. (Check the satnav manual, you say? Please – to us technophobes, it could be written in Urdu).

So when I took over the driving again with strict instructions to touch nothing, I had to either maintain 54 mph through sleepy French villages and 52 mph on autoroutes, or continue with Alex’s obscure solution. In a bid to lighten the mood I likened the situation to ‘Speed’ where Sandra Bullock, (or ‘Bollocks’ as we affectionately know her), has to maintain 50 mph driving a coach or a bomb planted on board explodes. Sandra, though, doesn’t have failing hearing like me, hence the need for Alex’s urgent calls whenever she heard the buzzer and why, but for a full load of wine, there might be a trail of gibbering hitchhikers still lying in our wake.

We’re home now, the glitch remains but there are definite signs of goodwill returning and the Golf’s due for a service soon where there’s bound to be a lad at the garage who can read Urdu.

India’s Thar Desert isn’t Peter O’Toole desert, too scrubby for that, but still desolate enough for a bend in the road to be viewed as a major feature. You can pass a hundred miles of nothing and then something. Like this – a perfect circle of a dozen sheep, their bowed heads facing inwards and touching as they doze, matched by another circle a quarter mile ahead. No one knows why. Maybe they’ve learnt how to shade their heads from the heat which can top 48 degrees; maybe they’re just attention seekers, and who could blame them?

If tired of our tabloid’s sleazy Premiership reporting, you might savour The Times of India’s Woosterish account of Sunday’s match, (above), at the Rajasthan Polo Club….

‘The very thought of a Cavalry versus Piramal clash can give you goose bumps. There will be adrenaline rush, some nasty tackles, a push here, a shove there. The rival players are close friends off the field but on the field, no one will give up an inch without a fight.
The Sunday clash assumed extra importance since the two are meeting for the Mount Shivalik Polo Challenge Cup. As expected, the fireworks were there and Cavalry pipped Piramal 5-4 in a thriller; much to the relief of talismanic Tarun Sirohi, Cavalry’s main sniper:
“I was so excited that I had my blood pressure measured immediately after the match,” said Sirohi in a post-match chat.’

I read this week you’d like to save as many private diaries as you can for the Wellcome Foundation’s Identity Project. I would have passed on mine, all fifty eight years and two and a half million words of them, but they’re promised to the children. Neither racy nor revealing, more mundane and nerdish in fact, but as I point out to them they include all the details of their lives from Day One.
Practically, they’ve proved of value when catching up with expenses, and a boon with my autobiography of Fleet Street days, ‘Lost in the Reptile House,’ with dates, places, and people triggering the memory. If, after reading these extracts from the five decades they cover you really fancy them, feel free to pop round and Xerox the lot.
Regards, Clive.

January 15th, 1951, (the year the diaries start), I’m at Beckenham Grammar School, aged fourteen and worried about imminent arrest on my bike in the dark.

‘Nothing much happened except Mr. Rule put me in detention for Wednesday. So I must get a back lamp before then. I made an effort tonight to get one, I unscrewed Auntie Con’s but found the interior was smashed. I looked for my one but couldn’t find it.’

Hello, Dr. Finkel? You still there? It gets better. Well, sort of… Ten years later, on January 15th, 1961, I’m a fledgling photojournalist on the sports page of the Eagle comic shooting a British Olympic gold medallist.

‘Drove to Alperton Sports track where we met Don Thompson who we’d passed earlier who told us he had walked from his home 17 miles away. With two boys from his club he showed us the do’s and don’ts of walking and we finished four rolls of HP3 in cold wind.’

By January 15th., 1971, I’ve reached The Sun, (with diary entries growing shorter as lunches grew longer), recording Action Girl, a reporter who performed death-defying stunts dreamt up by readers.

‘I joined Tricia at Fairfield Hall where we did her on the trapeze.’

Tricia survived, moving on to a career on television; I survived, along with my liver, and moved to the Daily Mail as a photographer. By January 15th.,1981, I was seeking an office car, but as I tried to sell my first written feature, got an early warning from my accountant about the freelance writing world.

‘I found a Honda Accord 4 door available in W3 in beige but Alex didn’t like the colour. Sent Features Editor of The Times the Dunchideock Fete piece. Henry Bach sent his tax papers settling them at nil profit, but a £70 bill.’

Another decade and the entry for January 15th., 1981 could, spookily, have been written today…

‘To Bow Streeet for an MP on a rail fares fiddle charge, but he didn’t turn up. Switched to a vox pop in Regents Park mosque where they said to me yes, Saddam is a monster but you and the US made him one with your aid.

By January 15th., 1991, we finally got the Battersea flat we’d been after – and the bed.

‘We went to our solicitor and signed for No. 92, then to Lillie Road where we ordered a 5’ bed for around £300.

And today, January 15th., 2010? A New Year’s Resolution that the diaries will be less embarrassingly mundane and nerdy – and more embarrassingly racy and revealing.

The first was a paragraph in The Times reporting a Parachute Regiment corporal, selling his Falklands War Military Medal after losing his job, said it was the second hardest thing in his life. ‘The first was telling my soldiers to fix bayonets,’ he said.

And the second was news that Mickey Rooney was appearing in pantomime this Christmas in Milton Keynes.

A Happy New Year to everyone.

Such Yoko moments might involve people or places and vary in length of incubation before the urge to self-mutilate. For what it’s worth, here’s my Will-to-Live Countdown. Let me know of any omissions …