It's the height of the silly season, and the capital glows in the unexpectedly seasonal heat. For anyone who has not forsaken London for the seaside or elsewhere, I recommend the witty diversions of Video Quartet by Christian Marclay, at White Cube in Hoxton Square until 30 August. Four screens project a profusion of film fragments choreographed seamlessly with accompanying soundtrack – clips from Hollywood movies, of singers and musicians (from Hendrix to Sinatra and Callas), concentrating on keyboards, horns and violins.

The sexually explicit scenes in Sex and the City – now into its last series on Channel 4 – make me feel like Maurice Chevalier: I'm so glad that I'm not young any more. It is not that I feel, as my husband Richard West does, that it is all quite 'filthy' and 'disgusting' (he recalls with fondness the Old Aussie saying 'There's nothing worse than toilet talk from sheilas'): goodness me, I'm no prude. It is just that some of the sexual gymnastics, particularly as demonstrated by Samantha and the young men she picks up, seem somehow both humiliating and competitive.

This name is seldom, if ever, on the lips of the man in the saloon bar. But mention Sir Hayden Phillips to men of affairs, men of a certain consequence in our public life, men who are members of his club, Brooks's, and you will find that they laugh, or smile at least, and say what an amusing fellow he is, besides being a brilliant operator. There is something about the mere thought of Sir Hayden that cheers people up.

I remember Wales: the early start from a sleeping Liverpool, the changes of trains and freezing waiting-rooms at polysyllabic stations, the endless trek across the permanent Sunday that was Anglesey in the 1950s. None of this was supposed to be fun. There were family connections stretching back over 100 years to a fiercely biblical great-grandfather, who had walked from Somerset to Amlwch for a job on the new railway.