YOU know what I really like about writing this column each week? Once it's written, it stays written.

I mean, the editor doesn't change it or ask me to write it again. You might think that that goes for all articles in the newspapers. Well, not on the nationals it doesn't. I've been asked to write from time to time for the London newspapers and sometimes I think it's more trouble than it's worth.

This is what usually happens. I get a phone call from a woman who is probably about thirty-two, but she talks like a baby. She is called Sara Double-Barrel. (She was christened "Sarah" of course, but she's knocked the "h" off for fashion's sake). She calls herself Commissioning Editor. What she wants is an article about, say, the church's attitude to human cloning. So we talk about it for a few minutes over the phone. This is called a briefing. I agree to write the piece and go away to start work. With luck, half a day later and the piece is done. I send it by e-mail, as requested. An hour later and Sara D-B rings back: "Great piece, Peter! But I just wondered if we could change it slightly?" What she means by this is that she'd like me to do a complete rewrite.

With the utmost respect I say, "But I thought I'd given you what you asked me for?"

"Well, yes," she says "but since I read it I've had a couple of new thoughts... "

So I listen to what she says. Actually, this second briefing is no less incoherent than the first one. London newspapers are awash with this sort of bimbo-style Commissioning Editor. They can't think straight or even hold two ideas in their heads for ten seconds. If they ever write to you, the grammar is like a bomb site. Well, for Sarah D-B you might expect to spend three days tinkering with your article. Countless phone calls in which she says things like, "It's fine now. But could we just change the order of paragraphs three and four?"

They have no sense of English style. I once wrote a piece on the General Synod. I said it was boring. Rather, I quoted Eliot and wrote, "Tumid apathy and no concentration: men and bits of paper". In the paper they changed this to, "There was a lot of apathy".

In the long distant past I enjoyed - if that's the right word - a rather longer attachment to a London paper, and this meant that now and again I had to go into the office and actually meet the Sarah D-B type in person. What is she like? She dresses to kill, or as if she's on her way to an erotic funeral. If she ever takes you out to lunch to discuss an assignment, she eats nothing and drinks diet Coke or, if she's really in party mood, a small glass of dry white wine and soda. Don't think that Fleet Street is the delightful empire of booze that it used to be. Political correctness rules these days, and drink is frowned on - which is the last thing anyone ought to do with it.

They don't know anything except soaps and celebs. I think my best story is of when I asked a particular Sara D-B if I could write about Dunkirk on the 50th anniversary of that great escape: "T'riffik idea, Pete! Just refresh my memory - what was Dunkirk?"

*Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange