Come on Tim, England needs you

It was lovely while it lasted. The world seems a more workaday place now; that heady mixture of sunshine, alcohol and hope has dissipated, and everything seems duller, more subfusc and predictable. Christmas never quite made it. We are left only with the sense of loss, the endless might-have-beens, and the alcohol.

This week I flew into Heathrow. We approached from the east, and passed along the Thames, which for once, in the sun, did look like a river of fire. I could see Tower Bridge, the dome, the London Eye, and the Palace of Westminster. Then, very small indeed, on a bend in the river, was Craven Cottage, Fulham's charming ground which actually has a sort of half-timbered cottage in the corner. Naturally it's being knocked down for a new stadium.

The only time I visited was two months ago, where I saw a terminally dreary match ending Fulham 0, Leicester 0. The single moment of excitement came when the owner, Mohamed Al Fayed, appeared to the cheers of the only crowd in Britain that likes him, and pranced around the touchline accompanied by young women in skimpy tight fitting clothes. The whole event seemed to me, in retrospect, what life is going to be like for the next short while - until, that is, Tim Henman is knocked out of Wimbledon.

· A cheering gag. It comes from Barry Cryer, who is the fount of all jokes, and may even have a team of elves in a sweatshop somewhere, frantically writing them to meet the stream of orders. Two days after September 11, George Bush and Rudolph Giuliani went to Ground Zero to inspect the wreckage. They found themselves next to a British tourist who had come to see for himself.

"Where ya from?" asked the president.

"From Wolverhampton," he replied.

"Ah doan' know Wolverhampton. What state is that in?"

"Much loike this, reelly."

· At least we won't need to see some of the ads which have accompanied the World Cup coverage. That fine actor, Samuel L Jackson, walking along a dirt road, talking gibberish to himself. What's all that about? Every time I see it I forget what it's for, and then at the end I see once again, Barclays. Ah, the grasping bank which causes such distress in small communities by closing down branches! Do they really think that having a cool black actor pretending to be mad will make them look sharp and cutting edge, instead of just greedy and mean?

The saddest of all is Garrison Keillor, that wonderful writer who I believe has never written a dud line. He is the voice-over on that appalling commercial which contains constructions such as: "Ever wondered why man's favourite word is 'OK'? So why invent the lightbulb, when candles are OK? What if the word was - 'what if'?" This turns out to be an ad for Honda - "the power of dreams", though why such a horrible, convoluted, patronising, meaningless piece of garbage like this should want to make you buy a car, I cannot claim to know. I think of this as a kind of corporate cuddling. Neither of these ads will make any viewers dispose of a penny of their money in one direction or another. But they make the heads of these vast multi-national corporations feel just wonderful about themselves.

· I spent Wednesday morning at the Saville inquiry in London/Derry, giving evidence. It's estimated that the inquiry will cost around £200m in the end, and if they can afford to fly me over, put me up in a decent hotel, and provide quite a big car, then I can see why. I wasn't even at Bloody Sunday. What I did do was write an article in the Guardian a few days before saying that the paratroopers had been so rough so many times that a number of British army units had asked for them not to be sent into their areas; by beating people up indiscriminately they were undoing such community relations as had been established. The article caused quite a bit of fuss at the time - hitherto private memos and telegrams the inquiry has received show that even the defence secretary got involved - but not surprisingly that died down after Bloody Sunday itself.

So my evidence could hardly be more marginal. Still, there I was, and astonished by the sheer size of the operation. The core of the inquiry occupies the whole of the main hall in Derry's Guildhall. There are dozens of giant computer screens, one on every desk, so the net effect is as if mission control at Houston had been built in the mock gothic style, with carvings, stained glass windows and an organ, then staffed by lawyers.

The witness sits at a desk in one corner, near the three judges, looking out on this sea of hi-tech and all those chaps who look as if they'd be a lot happier if they were allowed to wear their wigs, as they usually do while clocking up £300 an hour. On the whole they were perfectly courteous, though the counsel for the soldiery were keen to establish that I was a sloppy, unreliable journalist. Actually I am now, but in those days, 30 years ago, I had this ferocious belief in the power of truth, as naive young men often do. Of course the more I insisted that I'd been right, the more it sounded like whiny special pleading.

The software is terrific. When the brief for, say, the paratroopers says: "Now, Mr Hoggart, I want you to look at the third paragraph in the second column of your article," two seconds later the words flash up on the screen with a coloured arrow pointing to them.

Eyewitnesses have an even spiffier programme. There is a map of the city, covered in numbered red dots. If someone says, "I was standing at number 27", the view flashes up on the screen, with four arrows, designed to turn the panorama through 360 degrees. It's made up of colour photographs, but where buildings have changed, an artist, working from old pictures, has represented them, meaning in effect that you can create the entire area, in the round, on the screen, exactly as it was in January 1972.

This programme is called "virtual reality", which seems a pretty good title for the whole of Northern Ireland.

The big story there was John Ware's amazing revelations on Panorama about the murder of the lawyer, Pat Finucane. What struck me again was the creative Ulster use of language: the murderer said on camera, "the peelers wanted him whacked", a weird blend of old Victorian slang with gangster talk off The Sopranos.

I once got a lift from a Northern Ireland colleague. He was trying to squeeze into a tight space, and said to a passing boy, "will you watch me park my car, now?"

"Why?" asked the boy, "are ye very good at it?"

· I've had a number of emails taking issue with my assertion that Humphrey Lyttleton's gag about Lionel Blair and The Two Gentlemen of Verona is the filthiest joke ever on Radio 4. A number of readers claim the title for another Blair joke: about how he pulled off Twelve Angry Men in less than a minute. I do not know, and leave the choice up to readers.