GOD SAVE THE LIZ

Other engagements caused me to miss Elton’s White Tie and Tiara Ball, but can I say how much I enjoyed the pictures? In particular Liz Hurley, queening it up in her Versace and tiara ensemble. Was Liz pushing next season’s imperial trend (see Alexander McQueen, above) or is she simply more majestic than ever?

I called David (Furnish). “We’re euphoric,” he said, referring to the record £10m raised for the Elton John Aids Foundation, to be spent with the usual exemplary prudence. But Liz, what of Liz? “There was a lot of beauty on the lawn,” he says, “but Liz was unofficial queen.” No silly jokes, please, about who the official queen was.

PIGS IN CLOVER

You are nobody in Somerset these days without your own pair of rare-breed porkers. The hotelier Martin Miller — famed host of late-night jamming sessions featuring Kate Moss, Jimmy Page and Slash — is building a castle with a crystal chandelier for his two best boys, Boris and Johnson, at his new place, Glencot House.

How will Nick Jones’s Babington House, up the road, beat that? In fairness, I’ve encountered swine at Babington before, just not necessarily the porcine kind.

HOW TO BE GOOD

Reports are flooding in from festivals of spectacular acts of kindness emanating from Oxfam stewards. Teams of volunteers — many with West Country accents — have been calming revellers when they’ve overdone it on the apple cider and helping them back to their tents when they’ve forgotten what year it is. “We’re just here to help solve problems,” said one. Let’s hear it for the saints in the fluoro jackets.

ECO DILETTANTE, PART TWO

Things have really changed around here since my big revelation last week about the evils of flying to parties. I’ve been at Topshop Oxford Circus, where Rubbish magazine had organised a recycling workshop, supervised by the milliner Piers Atkinson and sculptor Andrew Logan.

Logan had brought along four “flowers of the apocalypse”, fashioned from old hubcaps. “What’s an apocalypse?” asked a girl to my right.

“It’s where we all go in the end,” Logan said, looking wearily around the shop.

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