FORTY-TWO years ago this spring, the wedding of Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstrong-Jones took place just a day or two after that of Miss Shirley Parkinson, spinster of Ormesby parish, and myself. In our honeymoon hotel in the Lake District "my wife and I", that then still novel concept, watched the ceremony on television - which was itself still something of a novelty. We began married life without a TV set.

The coincidental start of our marriage with a "royal" counterpart has always led us to cast a perhaps sharper eye than otherwise on events in the personal lives of this other, more glittering couple - alas so quickly de-coupled. I'm ready to admit, too, that whatever the public standing of not-the-most-popular-princess-in-the-world, I retained a sneaking regard for Princess Margaret earned when, in my adolescence, I discovered she shared my passion for the music of Sid Phillips, whose band she often engaged for balls at the Palace.

None of the obits I've read has listed the Princess's Desert Island discs. But, again like myself, she was certainly more Count Basie than the Beatles, more Sinatra than the Stones. And we people with high musical taste must stick together.

But the Princess's life was a classic demonstration that fame and wealth, even when allied to good looks, are no guarantee of happiness. The Princess's parties and drinking, her tirelesss pursuit of pleasure, were a desperate search or substitute for happiness, which lay in relationships she couldn't achieve.

I hope the Church of England reflects strongly on its role in swerving the Princess from the marriage of her choice. How bereft of wisdom was the Archbishop of Canterbury's dogmatic insistence on the indissolubility of marriage - a line now taken by few except the Pope - unmarried of course.

I have always felt the Princess's life was perfectly expressed in John Betjeman's poem about the ageing "nightclub proprietress". Her vibrant young years are captured in the lines "when my nose excited passion, my clothes were all the fashion, and my beaux were never cross when I was late, there was sun enough for lying upon beaches, there was fun enough for far into the night.'' And her later, darker years are in these lines: "I'm dying now and done for, what on earth was all the fun for?'' There's a further line you might think is spot-on too. But look it up yourself.

FROM the speed with which Chief Supt Kevin Pitt, the Cleveland policeman caught urinating against the Lithuanian presidental palace, claimed he was the victim of a police "stitch-up", you might be excused for thinking the practice actually goes on, and Chief Supt Pitt is familiar with it. Never. After all, he was in Lithuania to instruct the police about ethics.

* DRIVE a five-year-old VW Polo that I am thinking of changing for a new Polo. But if there is one thing that would persuade me not to buy a Polo it is the bumph I have received urging me to get one. "I am not invincible, I just feel that way,'' it declares. "The new Polo is a tough car and there is a danger that new Polo drivers will think they are too.'' Well, this old Polo driver won't, doesn't want to, and believes the macho sales pitch is exactly what is not wanted in promoting cars. Besides - it's ridiculous.

Published: 13.02.02