On Sunday 31 August 1997, because of a surfeit of wedding champagne the evening before, I woke unaccustomedly early. Putting on the radio I heard a report, it turned out to be the very first, from Agence France Press (AFP) of the death of Princess Diana. My instant reaction, uttered aloud, was: "Well, that will be mighty convenient for a number of people".

There are still those in the United Kingdom who fancy that the system was in grave danger because the mother of the heir to the throne was enjoying a relationship with a Moslem, by whom she might have been or might soon have become pregnant.

Given the notoriously self-indulgent conduct of most royal personages a precedent was hardly being set. In the saccharin aftermath the simple maxim that you can judge a person by the company she keeps was completely lost sight of, but so clear was the rift between Diana's behaviour and the expectations of those who presume to dictate terms they do not accept for themselves that the conspiracy theory has never died.

The matter was recently revived by the publication of the official investigation report which blamed the driver for the fatal crash and I might not have thought any more of this triviality had it not been for parallel developments. My reflection was that if the intelligence services had a hand in what would then have been a murder they handled it very badly; falling overboard from a yacht, Robert Maxwell style, would have been much better and there was plenty of opportunity to contrive it; and if the intelligence services were detailed to keep her alive they didn't manage that very well either.

Indeed, although there is the widest gulf of all between fiction and reality in the field of espionage, between glamour and routine, there is surely one striking similarity; intelligence in Intelligence is an oxymoron. When I was working in West Africa I was, to draw a parallel, always more worried that I would be hit by an accidental bullet from the machine gun of a lounging pubescent thug in uniform than I would be deliberately shot for a supposed infringement...

This is the time of year when, if you haven't already begun thinking about your Holiday shopping list, some advertiser or other will begin to remind you to get on the stick.

Put another way, this is the time of year, the Mean Season, when if any of your friends or acquaintances are questionable --- such that you will end up wanting to kick yourself for having wasted good money on buying them a gift --- now is the time to break off the relationship. You'll thank yourself later.

You can do this in (relatively) good conscience now and few people will notice the underlying motivation for the alienation. If you wait until the end of October, when the worse of the "giving" barrage and treacly sentimentality ramp up, your motives will be too transparent, if not suspect.

I know.

I recall the ignominy of dumping a girlfriend during Christmas week. Poor dear, she expected that I had come to her house in order to suggest that we "go steady." When I announced that I had come to dump her, she was shattered. Everyone else said that I had dumped her because I was too cheap to buy both her and my newest love-interest gifts. People will always talk. If you have half a brain or one modicum of Enlightened Self-Interest you will not let their opinions affect your decisions.

The simple fact is that most of us have more friends, family and acquaintances, by choice or happenstance, than we need to bear the financial burden of catering to during the Holidays...