The new Palladio exhibition at the Royal Academy is a must for fans of Palladianism and classical architecture. I loved it, but I can see there’s not enough outside this rather specialist field to detain the politely interested for very long.

Without any doubt the stars of the exhibition are the large, exquisitely detailed models of Palladio’s buildings constructed in the early 1970s by the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, in Vicenza.

Villa Capra ditta La Rotonda

Two are illustrated here, a model of the Villa Capra — the Rotonda — in Vicenza, and the 2.5 metres long model of the church of the Redentore in Venice. They were made from lime and beech wood with porcelain biscuit details, and they made me long for a magic mushroom so I could live in them.

Il Redentore

With my typographic hat on I was thrilled to see a fragment of the first edition of Palladio’s Quattro Libri dell’Architettura (Venice, 1570).

Il Terzo Libro

There was an interesting virtual heritage reconstruction of Palladio’s proposal for the Rialto Bridge in Venice, and here I’m happy to say the best design won, because the existing Rialto bridge, designed by Antonio da Ponte in 1591 (Tony da bridge?) is far more characterful and romantic than Palladio’s sadly insipid design. Strange then, that the Palladian Bridge (no resemblance to his proposal for the Rialto) is one of the icons of grand garden architecture in the UK. I counted 34 mentions of Palladianism in Follies Grottoes and Garden Buildings.

Where I felt the exhibition faltered was in ignoring Palladio’s mighty influence on architecture since his time. Apart from a nod to Inigo Jones, whose drawings looked hasty and slapdash compared to the formal elegance from Palladio’s studio, there was nothing to show that builders today are busy debasing Palladianism in places like Bishop’s Avenue and California for clients who believe that Palladianism equals taste. Not so. Proportion and rhythm equals taste.

The exhibition is organised by the Royal Academy of Arts and the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, Vicenza with the collaboration of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Photographs by Alberto Carolo.

The media is full of the death of John Updike, one of America’s finest writers. Tributes from luminaries grace every newspaper, blog and website.

I never cared greatly for his acclaimed ‘Rabbit’ novels, but my tribute to him is to give him his own voice. Here’s an extract from his short story A Soft Spring Night in Shillington, PA (his home town):

A few housefronts farther on, what had been Henry’s Variety Store in the nineteen-forties was still a variety store, with the same narrow flight of cement steps going up to the door beside a big display window. Did children still marvel within as the holidays wheeled past in a slow pinwheel galaxy of altering candies, cards and artifacts, of back-to-school tablets, footballs, Halloween masks, pumpkins, turkeys, pine trees, tinsel, wrappings, reindeer, Santas, and stars, and then the noisemakers and conical hats of New Year’s celebration, and Valentines and cherries as the days of short February brightened, and then shamrocks, painted eggs, flowers and baseballs?

Now there was a writer.

My friend Graham Sadd sent me this:

Can you imagine working for an organisation which has just over 600 workers, and which has the following statistics?

* 29 of them have been accused of spouse abuse
* 7 have been arrested for fraud
* 19 have been accused of writing bad cheques
* 117 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses
* 3 have done time for assault
* 71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit
* 4 have been arrested on drug-related charges
* 8 have been arrested for shoplifting
* 21 are currently defendants in lawsuits
* 84 have been arrested for drink driving in the last year

Which organisation is this?

It’s the 635 members of the House of Commons, the same group that cranks out hundreds of new laws each year designed to keep the rest of us in line.

So you do work for them.

Whenever my Taid (grandfather) was asked how he was, he would always reply “Sâl, marw.”

It’s pronounced “Sarl Márroo,” but no simple ordering of characters on a screen can convey the hollow despair and resignation that moaned through those three simple syllables.

I’m afraid we children laughed at him, and repeatedly asked him how he was so we could hear him say it again.

Now I know how he felt. I’ve been sâl marw over this weekend. Oh, I forgot — it means “sick and dying.”

I’m NEVER ill, if you don’t count the polio as a child, the ulcer in 1987 and the ‘flu in 1988. The ‘flu was probably the worst.

Occasionally I get a cold, but otherwise fleas envy my fitness.

On Friday evening I sat down with a beer to enjoy a Heineken Cup match on telly. Within 15 minutes I got very cold. It was strange, because I was aware the room was warm, but I wasn’t. I put on a jacket and jumper but still shivered. We had a lovely salami supper planned, and all of a sudden it didn’t seem so appealing. I had to struggle to finish my beer.

At half time I thought sod this, I’m going to bed to try and warm up. So I put on my thick, heavy towelling dressing gown and my binge walking socks and crawled into bed. I lay there shivering, not reading, not watching TV. I was coughing hard and regularly.

An hour later I just made it to the loo in time to throw up. This happened six more times between 10pm and 3am. I heard each hour strike, and felt more and more despairing and miserable. I was coughing so much my ribs hurt. Head was pressurized from inside like a balloon; no actual headache.

On Saturday morning Von called NHS Direct. They said it probably wasn’t fatal. What did they know? Rest and lots of liquid, they said. But we were going to Hampshire to a Siblings and Spouses reunion, which I was really looking forward to — Richard and Brenda, Jo and Paul, Andrew and Shân, me and Yvonne.

I felt as if I’d been beaten up. The thought of food repelled me.

For the rest of Saturday I lay in bed and got up intermittently. I didn’t have enough concentration to read or do anything. I had a bath in the late afternoon but didn’t feel any better for it. I didn’t have any supper, so apart from tea and orange juice Saturday was a Nil By Mouth day. I may have lost a pound. I could be on to something here, peddling infectious diseases that make you lose your appetite, for weak-willed dieters.

I had a quiet Sunday and a modest food intake (for me). Two lightly boiled eggs, two pieces of toast and marmite, a slice of bread with smoked salmon and cream cheese, a wafer thin slice of Parma ham, 1 1/2 slices of salami Milano, one slice of salami Finocchiona, a slice of ciabatta, two cherry tomatoes and a sliver of Bufala mozzarella. When you write it down it looks like a huge amount, but it was nothing at all, really.

Dizzy Monday morning. I went in to work, but I’d better not sign any contracts, do any deals or launch any new initiatives today. I feel groggy.

Today’s intake: a cantuccini with coffee, two slices of caws pobi.

Taid was right all along. He was indeed sâl, marw. He died at the age of 94, still smoking 30 Player’s Navy Cut a day. What a strange man he was. He worked as a labourer to earn enough money to put himself through university at Cambridge (Fitzwilliam College); was ordained; then was appointed to a succession of unimaginably remote rural livings in North Wales. None of his villages had a population of more the 200 souls and one, Dylife, where my father was born, had just 10. Including the entire Headley family.

I read one of his diaries, for 1928. Beautiful handwriting and absolutely nothing to say. No thoughts, no opinions, no dreams, just a log of the domestic and clerical events of the day.

I feel a kinship with him.

Having heard a lot about the success of thriller writer James Patterson, I took one of his books out of the library.

I read it and returned it an hour later, a little miffed that I hadn’t spotted they’d given me the remedial reading version by mistake.

“Oh no sir, they’re all like that,” said the librarian.

I was astounded and a little annoyed. How could this man be making a fortune out of writing books so simple a child could understand them?

My annoyance evolved into admiration. It’s hard to write simply. Patterson is obviously a highly intelligent man who is able to conceal it.

But as far as remedial readers went, this set me to thinking. I used to work in educational publishing, and the remedial readers we published were frankly no incentive to learn to read. They were boring, dull. Why not tell an exciting story?

And when learning a foreign language, why were the stories and situations recounted so crashingly tedious? Tell a good story, and the words fly by. The idea struck me — James Patterson in French!

I trawled bookshops in France, Belgium and Luxembourg. I was met with a raised eyebrow or a sneer of disdain. “James PatAirson? We do not care for zat.”

Yesterday, walking down Warwick Street, parallel with Regent Street, I came across the European Bookshop. I never even knew it was there. So I went in; a long, quiet room packed with French books (for European, read French) and bookcase after bookcase of novels arranged alphabetically by author. I was pleased to see they had three separate editions of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. I’d read Proust in the Scott Moncrieff English translation Remembrance of things past last year and enjoyed it so much I wanted to read it in the original French, but my French simply ain’t good enough.

Here was the answer. A French remedial reader I could get to grips with. No Patterson under the Ps, so I asked the assistant. She pursed her lips and looked disapproving. She led me to a dark corner of the shop, knelt down and furtively produced a slim volume from a lower shelf. “Zis?” I checked. 107 chapters, page and a half each, yes, that was zat.

I was of no further interest to the bookseller, but as I was buying I explained my intentions to use it as a French remedial reader. A huge grin split her face.

So here I am with La Maison au bord du lac. 343 pages of Literature. The last book I read in French was Trois Contes by Maupassant (where I learned the meaning of the word genuflection).

I’ll let you know how I get on.

Walking down the hill with Milo this morning three successive people greeted me with big grins and hearty ‘Good mornings!’

I responded in like kind, even though I’d never seen any of them before in my life. Then it occurred to me that I probably had, and simply didn’t recognise them.

In case you think this is a manifestation of the early onset of Alzheimer’s, you are mistaken. I’ve always been like this. I find it hard to recognise people, let alone remember their names.

This is a handicap for someone who spent much of his life in publishing PR, but it also meant I flourished in environments such as the Frankfurt Book Fair, where everyone wore name labels. I was safe, confident, and impressive. Freed from the nagging worry of trying to recall who people were, I could relax and play my spiel.

You do learn to compensate. I could remember numbers, no problem. But with faces I had to come clean and ask people for forgiveness. At first it took the form of self-deprecation — “I’m sorry, I have this dreadful thing about names …” but as my charm lessened with age I had to come up with something less offensive and egotistical.

So I invented the term Nominal Dysphasia to describe my disability. People tutted and nodded seriously and sympathetically.

The other day I saw the phrase Nominal Dysphasia in print. Bloody hell, I thought, they’ve pinched my condition.

And indeed they have. I googled Nominal Dysphasia and got 1,300 hits. They all refer to a condition exactly like mine. Nothing reveals the origin of the term, but I made it up at least 25 years ago. Did it already exist then, and I unknowingly created it in parallel with someone else?

If not, can I lay claim to it and rechristen it Headley’s Syndrome?

4 minutes into this week’s Sounds of the Sixties, the classic weekly Radio 2 show, the veteran presenter and DJ Brian Matthew introduces Jet Harris with ‘My Lady’, written by Reg Presley of the Troggs.

Except it wasn’t completely Jet Harris. It was the Sloane Squares, with lead singer Pete Gage, and Gwyn Headley playing the world’s shortest guitar solo right at the end, all fourteen notes of it.

And it was good to hear it again. My 6 copies long ago disappeared.

We always claimed it got to #1 in Denmark, and reached #28 on the Radio London Hot 40, but in truth it was an absolutely terrible record. The B side, ‘You Don’t Live Twice’, was a much better song, but the James Bond vehicle ‘You Only Live Twice’ kind of confused matters.

I think I’m beginning to repeat myself. I blogged this last May, the last time Brian Matthew played ‘My Lady’, and included a photograph of the Sloane Squares in our pomp. So I’ve heard it twice in less than 12 months.

It’s beginning to grow on me. It’s clearly impressed Brian Matthew.

Even Schumacher couldn’t win everything.

As a relative newcomer, he inexplicably came in second in the 1994 Spanish Grand Prix.

When asked the reason for his failure to win, he explained he’d been stuck in fifth gear for the last 50 laps.

The same has just happened to me.

Driving from Harlech to London in Yvonne’s 10 year old MGF, I came thundering over the Craig-y-Bwlch pass into Dinas Mawddwy and on the long straight running down into the village I slotted neatly into fifth.

At least, I did; but the car didn’t. It stayed resolutely in fourth gear.

At the Mallwyd roundabout (the Brigands Inn, if you’re thirsty) I dropped down into second. The MG preferred fourth.

So I slowed right down and picked first. Got fourth.

Hmmm.

I stirred the gear stick around. It was like waving a wand, but magically it only selected fourth gear.

Not only that, but I couldn’t get neutral. This was going to be a problem. The road from Harlech (A496, A470, A458) to Shrewsbury goes up, down, in, out, and round about. It takes about an hour and a half if the traffic’s light, but you do need to use as many gears as the car’s got.

Icicle Corner (properly Llidiart y Barwn, a hairpin bridge over the Afon Clywedog) is a first or second gear bend, and with the temperature at 27°F it had to be treated with respect. I pottered through it in fourth. The car coped superbly.

Why it’s called Icicle Corner

It seems strange to praise a car which had just deposited its raison d’etre on a Welsh mountainside, but the flexibility and pliancy of the MG’s engine impressed me. I felt I might just avoid having to trouble Britannia Rescue.

And so it proved. Once I reached Shrewsbury and negotiated the five roundabouts on the bypass, it was motorway all the way. No difficulty about staying in fourth. The next problem would be London.

Someone was smiling on me, because when I got to London every light was green. I took a long route round to Mount View Road to avoid as many of the sleeping policemen as I could, but of course it’s impossible, as Islington and Haringey have split their massive budgets between Icelandic banks and destroying MGs and other low-slung motor cars.

I can’t help thinking that the proliferation of these speed humps in London in probably the cause of the MG’s failure. It is impossible to avoid noisily grounding the car on them, whatever speed you travel at. On the other hand, the Citroën barely notices them. How do I prove it?

As I pulled up to the house, a car moved out of a double length parking space right outside. I could drive in without reversing (no reverse gear, of course.)

What a clever little car. What a lucky driver. Over 200 miles stuck in fourth gear.

That’s further than Herr Schumacher’s 50 laps.