Editor-At-Large: My stubby, red-eyed, white-faced love rival

Slough is not somewhere you'd expect to stage a ground-breaking show, is it? The last time I visited, the most exciting event was a row between two rival taxi firms in the station forecourt. But all that is to change, and not because Damien Hirst has decided to include the town on the tour of his latest opus, a play about Glastonbury in a tent.

Slough is about to enter the history books, big time. Book your seats now for East Berkshire Magistrates' Court on 21 November, when the Princess Royal is to be the first member of the Royal Family to answer criminal charges.

It is alleged that her bull terriers (one is named Eglantyne) bit two children in Windsor Great Park last April, and, if found guilty, the Princess faces a maximum fine of £5,000 and up to six months in prison. This news has been received very sadly at Street-Porter Towers, not because I am a closet royalist (although the hard-working no-nonsense Anne is the only member of that ghastly family I would exempt from a cull or compulsory rehabilitation if I was running Britain) but because my partner is deeply in love with Staffordshire bull terriers.

It's hard to accept that your love rival is a white thing with red eyes, pointy ears, a long low forehead, barrel chest and stubby legs, but that's the case. Undeterred by the fact that I have declared myself a pet-loather on national television, my partner has been plotting to bring his new love into our lives. The other day I caught him reading a slim hardback book full of pin-up pictures hidden inside the latest Irvine Welsh paperback at bedtime.

It was titled How to Choose Your Bull Terrier. "Just look at how lovely a Brindle is..." he bleated, like a junkie desperately craving the final fix. The phone number of a breeder in the Midlands slipped from between the pages. "You can forget it," I announced, "nothing that eats out of a bowl on the floor and requires the use of a pooper scooper is joining this household".

Deep down, though, I can admit that if I were allowed only one pet, and it came supplied with a canine butler, walker and pooper-scooper operative, that dog would be a bull terrier. Any dog that can be the prized pet of both Alexander McQueen and a member of the Royal Family is something special. These are noble animals which cannot be blamed if they are also the pet of choice of criminal low life and gay bodybuilders. Allegedly "friendly" and "devoted", according to my pet book, surely their appeal is because they resemble ruthless killing machines, almost medieval in appearance. If only I could breed one to bite the head off the yapping collie dog owned by my seaside neighbours in Kent. Every time I pass their home this fluffy monstrosity enters into a barking frenzy with all the ferocity of a wet dishcloth. My secret dream is that Buster, my (imagined) bull terrier, snaps off the head of this apology for a pet and I triumphantly impale it on a pole at the end of my garden for passers-by to gawp at. That's why I can't be allowed to have a pet, and Buster remains a fantasy. But, in the meantime, I intend to visit Slough, as Eglantyne and HRH clearly need my support.

More is less

Does biggest mean best? Anish Kapoor has come up with what the Tate Gallery is claiming is the largest sculpture in the world. I walked over the Millennium Bridge (sadly not wobbling now it has been turned into an erect structure by the fun-denying public health and safety tsars) to Tate Modern to see if Southwark could rival Slough as a ground-breaking place to hang out. Forget it. The giant turbine hall is filled with what looks like a 1950s drawing by Hoffnung rendered in three dimensions. In a thoroughly unfashionable shade of burgundy PVC, this uninspired sculpture just emphasises the shortcomings of the main space of the building, with the redundant upper level reached by dreary stairs. It's not good enough to come up with something huge if it doesn't create a dialogue with the viewer.

Old scrubbers

How many times a week do you kneel in front of that household altar called a washing machine? How many times have you prayed to its implacable porthole, begging it to release your clothes and not spew ten gallons of sudsy water over the floor, when it's having one of its little emotional turns? My machine had a menopausal moment the other day and screwed some expensive fleeces into little minced-up balls. Perhaps I hadn't patted it enough, I don't know, but the relationship between a woman and her washer-dryer is a mysterious and subtle thing. Now an entertaining exhibition at the Women's Library in London ("Dirty Linen, the History of Women and their Laundry") reveals some fascinating statistics.

The library's new building is on the site of a public bath house in Whitechapel, opened in 1846. In those days 160,000 women worked up to 14 hours a day in the laundry industry. Most of them were aged between 14 and 16. Before electricity, women used to take up to two days a week doing the family wash.

One display case features touchingly dated pamphlets from the 1960s – "Teaching Housecraft" and "A Guide to Household Routine". These days the H word has vanished with under-use and I can hardly remember my housecraft lessons in how to make an apron and bake an apple crumble – obviously key elements in training to be a wife. Nowadays our obsession with cleanliness means we spend an astonishing £25m a week on washing powder, but some things never change. Women still shove 85 per cent of the 6.5 billion loads of clothes in and out machines every year.

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The indefatigable Elaine Stritch has wowed critics with her one-woman show at the Old Vic. Wearing an unflattering pair of too-thin tights topped off with a simple white shirt, she stands on a bare stage with a stool as her only prop and delivers a monologue interspersed with songs by Noël Coward and Stephen Sondheim chronicling her life and showbiz times, battles with booze, romantic rejections and long-running virginity. At 76, she is a phenomenon – Princess Anne ought to pay a visit before her own opening in Slough. Stritch is brilliant and resilient but she's also spookily dislikeable and a tad too self-indulgent. Her vulnerability seems staged. This woman is about as cuddly as my fantasy bull terrier, Buster. She'd bite your head off in an instant, make no mistake about that. Go and admire the phenomenon but keep your distance.