The cycle of life

'The next day I turned up with the kit and the pump and the tyre levers - and couldn't believe my eyes. The tyre had been mended'

I only have one personal first-hand story about the Queen Mother. It suffers slightly from the fact that she doesn't really come into it. However, it does go straight to the corrupt and treacherous heart of the trade of journalism, so it's well worth telling again...

This goes back to the 1970s, when the sun always shone, when the music was even worse than usual, and when even pyjama bottoms were flared. At that time I lived in Notting Hill and bicycled to work in Fleet Street through the Royal Parks. Once, while in St James's Park, I had a bad puncture on a day when I was without any tools, so I left the bike chained to a railing and went home in a taxi.

Next day I turned up early with the kit and the pump and tyre levers and everything – and couldn't believe my eyes. There was nothing wrong with the tyre. It had been mended. Someone had mended my puncture. The fairies...?

Well, no, not the fairies, because then I noticed on the saddle a note left for me, which said: "Bike owner, please call at Lodge." There was indeed a small lodge I hadn't noticed. I went and knocked on the door. A man opened and said: "Ah, you're the man with the bike. Hope you don't mind. I saw you were in trouble. Thought I'd help you out."

"But who are you?" I asked.

"I'm the Queen Mother's gatekeeper," he said.

"Really?" I said. "That must be an interesting job."

"Interesting?" he said. "It's the most sodding boring job that anyone ever invented. I'm bored out of my mind sitting here. That's the basic reason I mended your puncture. Something to do!"

And we got talking, and we got on well, and I used to stop to talk to him quite regularly after that, as he was the only person I knew between Notting Hill and Fleet Street, and he didn't get many visitors. He used to regale me with gossip about the parks.

"See that bonfire over there?" he said to me one day. "That's the internal furnishings of Somerset House. They're ripping them out and burning them, and hoping nobody will notice."

If I had been an investigative journalist I would have followed that one up, but I wasn't. I was the sort of journalist who wrote articles about bicycling in London, as I seem to be doing now. Indeed, back in the 1970s, I was doing it already, as there was an exchange of letters in The Times just about then, all about bicycling in London, so I wrote a letter all about my amazing experience with the magically mended tyre, which was duly printed and ignored.

Though not entirely.

Four weeks later there was an item in one of the tabloids, featuring my Queen Mother's gatekeeper, with a photograph of him mending a puncture for a pretty, leggy blonde bicyclist.

"Gallantry is not dead," trilled the story, which was written by one Rod Gilchrist. "When lovely blonde bicyclist so-and-so had a puncture in the Royal Parks, the Queen Mother's gatekeeper gallantly came to her assistance and nobly mended her steed. After some expert first aid to her inner tube, she was soon on her way again, but not before thanking her rescuer with a juicy kiss...", or words to that effect.

I was horrified. It seemed clear to me that there was some baleful connection between my letter and this "story". That evening I stopped to ask the old gatekeeper about it. Yes, it had all happened, he said. But he didn't know it was being done by a newspaper. He never saw a photographer. All he knew was that this blonde came and knocked on his door and asked for help. He mended her puncture. That was it. The photographer must have been lurking in the bushes.

So I rang up Rod Gilchrist at his paper and asked him if he had based his "story" on my letter, and he said yes, he had; it had given him the idea and he had set it up.

And that , ladies and gentlemen, is how stuff gets into your newspaper. I saw the other day that Rod Gilchrist is now very senior in some organisation or other. So crime does pay. But I'll leave the last word to the old gatekeeper.

"I wouldn't have minded so much if they had got the story straight," he said. "But do you remember when they said she gave me a big kiss as a reward? Never happened. Never even got that. You can't trust anything the papers say."

I'll drink to that.