Tales of the City: Doing the Lambeth walkabout Â

I'm bewildered to find that half the men of my acquaintance are buying guitars. A small epidemic of midlife-crisis axe-purchasing has broken out across the metropolis. Me, I've had the same guitar since I was a student, a bashed-up steel-stringed acoustic that used to have a big appliquéd butterfly stuck on the front to advertise what a hippie groover I was in the early Seventies.

I'm bewildered to find that half the men of my acquaintance are buying guitars. A small epidemic of midlife-crisis axe-purchasing has broken out across the metropolis. Me, I've had the same guitar since I was a student, a bashed-up steel-stringed acoustic that used to have a big appliquéd butterfly stuck on the front to advertise what a hippie groover I was in the early Seventies.

I'd take it on holidays to Holland and Ireland, to drive the chicks wild (fat chance) with my renditions of "So Long, Marianne" and "Big Yellow Taxi". Lately, it has been leaning against a radiator in the dining-room for so long that the neck has warped like an elderly swan's. But my son bought some new strings for it at Christmas, and when I started winding the machine-heads and listened to the boing-boing-eeeeeaaaww-twang of the metal wire stretching in a crescendo of pain across a yard of Japanese plywood – well, something, as thriller writers say, seemed to snap in my brain. I must, I thought, get a new one, something more ringingly appropriate to my lovely, if newly basso-profundo, voice.

Bang on cue, my friend Philip invited us round to his place to watch him play his new Gretsch electric, his left hand teasing out blistering solos to old Muddy Waters numbers on his tape deck. A week later, at a dinner party, Keith from Clapham took me to his study and displayed his new purchase – a Gibson Rosewood on which he thumped out the chords to half a dozen old Rolling Stones classics. "I only got it," he said shyly, "to help out my daughter, who is learning the guitar at school." Yeah, right – so that's why he bought her an electric Fender Stratocaster, as played by Eric Clapton, just the thing for a 14-year-old.

There followed a succession of Saturday afternoons trawling music shops in south London, where I looked for something I'd secretly coveted for years – an Ovation, that guitar with a roundy, hunchbacked body, that makes your puny, busker style sound like it's being played in Chartres cathedral.

But one of them, a gorgeous turquoise thing, had a built-in electric box with switches and a tantalising hole, into which you could introduce a plug, that ran down into an amplifier...

Back home, I got a call from James in Putney. "I think you ought to know," he said, "I've bought a guitar. Haven't played in years and years, of course, but I was in this shop..." He'd looked at a few £200 junior-league models in a fancy uptown emporium, then talked to the proprietor and told him the price-range he had in mind. Silence. Then, "I think you're going to need the room upstairs", the man said. Upstairs was a private sanctum, like a serious wine-tasting for pre-1985 clarets. After an hour of earnest discussion, James was presented with three posh Yamaha models to choose from, like a Fifties grande dame being given a floorshow of couture ballgowns to inspect.

Back home, I rang an electrically minded pal called Chris to ask about the feasibility of buying an instrument attached to an amplifier and speakers, and how much it might disrupt neighbourhood life in London SE21. "Don't buy anything from a shop," he counselled urgently. "I know a chap who can get you a second-hand Taylor for only a grand. In fact, I'm thinking of getting one myself..."

Good God. Philip, Keith, James, Chris et moi, with a combined age of 225 (and a range of about a dozen chords) between us, are all busily investing in musical instruments upon which we are (frankly) not terribly likely to base a career. Can it be the sight of the 50-year-old Sting at the Brit awards, whacking out his greatest hits and taking his shirt off in exultation?

Can it be the sight of Robert De Niro flourishing a Les Paul last week at the press launch of the We Will Rock You musical? Or is it simply that we Sixties kids have discovered that, with a tiny wedge of disposable income burning a hole in our Gap chinos, we want to return to the days of Genesis concerts and perform some high-expenditure karaoke?

That must be it. When you can at last afford to buy something resembling Keith Richards' Telecaster, you just go ahead and do it, failing to realise that it won't make you sound like the rock vampire of your youth. So now we subscribe to Guitar magazine, and talk about "the action" on the fretboard, and marvel at how you can bend an electrified note like, you know, Jimi Hendrix, and our womenfolk look on with pity.

And if your night's rest, O south-London slumberer, is now disturbed by a distant wailing of "Born to be Wild" or "Layla", issuing at some volume from some moonlit garden shed, don't blame me. Unless you live in Dulwich, that is.

I TUNED in to every available TV channel on Saturday evening, to find them all, from Sky News to BBC 1 (hosted by the rabbit-trapped-in-the-headlights Peter Sissons), saying the same thing, while the presenters, caught on the hop, struggled into dark suits and black ties during the commercial breaks: marvellous old party... didn't desert us in the Blitz... keen on horses... spanned three centuries... the mood here at Windsor is sombre... Prince of Wales devastated, rather more than when his ex-wife died... the Queen obviously upset, having just lost her sister... indomitable spirit... fond of a drink... don't mention the Abdication... loved Prince Charles... hip replacement at 95... keen, and then not keen, on Diana, Princess of Wales... dinners with Cecil Beaton, Noël Coward, T S Eliot (ho ho, what a glum fool)... disdained her sticks for the cameras... 75 years of service...

And we learnt about her less lovely side – the implacable matriarch who, more than anyone, stopped Princess Margaret marrying the man she loved, the Edwardian crypto-racist, the Royal who wasn't keen on meeting anyone ill or deformed, the one whom Diana described as "Chief leper in the leper colony".

So, what was the lasting legacy of the Queen Mum? It seems to come down to one thing: she was the first Queen to go on a walkabout. Nobody had done it before; even Elizabeth I at Tilbury Docks, where she made her great speech, never went so far as to duck into the crowd and actually ask people how they were doing.

But the Queen Mum did, in the Blitz. At first, they were hostile. Contemporary records show that people threw things and shouted "Go home rich bitch!" because she was wearing her full-fig jewellery to walk among the stricken and homeless. But – heaven knows on what whim – suddenly the Queen (or at least the Queen-Consort) was among them, saying: "My God, what a mess they've made of Poplar." And: "Do the bombs keep the baby awake all night?" And for the first time, the British public experienced, and got to hear about, a Royal who actually talked to you and seemed to take an interest in your family and your life.

She made the King do it, too. The only trouble was, walkabouting isn't a skill that comes naturally. She bequeathed an activity to a generation who couldn't reproduce her easy manner, and met the crowds seeming distant (the Queen) or insulting (the Duke of Edinburgh) or awkward (Charles) or positively hostile (Anne).

Nobody did it as well as the Queen Mum until the advent of Diana, Princess of Wales – who came to use it as a weapon against the Royals. You can't blame the great lady, though, for being the best meet-and-greeter in the business.

An eclectic guide to opening the doors of perception

Visitors to Winchester Cathedral over the Easter weekend may have thought this an odd sight to encounter in a place of worship, but we live in modern times. And there's nothing more complexly à la mode than a Michael Clark installation.

I've been a fan of the artist since he was a barman at the unspeakably decadent Colony Room in Soho and did photographically brilliant drawings of its louche greeters, Muriel Belcher and Ian Board. How far from Dean Street is the west door of the noble cathedral, where his five images of Christ's wounds are digitally projected onto the lock, constantly morphing into each other in an image-cluster of keys, nails, brutalised flesh, metal locks, and the ancient trope of the door as the path to heaven. Built into Clark's characteristically surreal, all-encompassing aesthetic is an audio-tape loop of the film director Nicolas Roeg, who can be heard intoning the five vowels, while the corresponding letters in a poem by Richard Crashaw (whose lines are projected onto a box beside the lock) glow in serial colours, corresponding to Rimbaud's conviction that A, E, I, O and U have colours of their own.

What it all adds up to I leave to the art critics, but I admire the way Mr Clark takes the idea of the Crucifixion wounds as doors of enlightenment, and runs off with it. William Blake would have liked his serious-minded concentration of images from a dozen sources – from the Bible (the piece is called "10: 07-09" and refers to the lines in St John's Gospel, "I am the door; by me, if any man enter in, he shall be saved...") to Francis Bacon, who once told Clark "Violence can unlock all kinds of areas of feeling and possibility." Any artist who can yoke together the Garden of Gethsemane, the metaphysical poets, mad French symbolists, Bacon's screaming popes and the director of Don't Look Now, is doing all right in my book.