Diary

Like a roll on the kettledrums, the row over Danny Danziger's book The Orchestra rumbles on. The book features 50 confessions by members of the London Philharmonic Orchestra about their extracurricular jollities and their opinions of conductors. First it upset the musicians, who apparently failed to realise they would be quoted so embarrassingly verbatim; and cuts were demanded. Then Sir Georg Solti, the orchestra's principal conductor, was told of his many appearances in its pages ("Solti makes you feel like shit," says the principal cellist at one point) and hit the roof. The book had to be recalled last week for three offending paragraphs, concerning tour fees, to be excised. Now, I hear, relations have so curdled between the Hungarian maestro and his wayward ensemble that Solti has refused to conduct the orchestra at its next date in May. Is this the end, or just an intermezzo?

You don't hear much about Martin Amis these days, do you? He used to be quite a promising young writer, but has virtually dropped out of sight, ignored by the media ... no, I can't keep it up. Like le tout Londres littraire, I went to the launch of The Information on Monday. It was held in the frankly barbaric Cobden Working Men's Club on the outer Westway shores of Notting Hill and featured a frantically cheesy house disco with optional (in fact compulsory) dry-ice machine - not the most glamorous setting in which to find the haute-gorgeousoisie of Nicky Shulman, Bella Freud, Nigella Lawson and Lucretia Stewart, the classy ancien rgime of Anne Barr, John Gross and Anthony Howard, or the more reclusive media luminaries such as Ian McEwan and Amis's lupine agent, Andrew "Jackal" Wylie, in his Brains-from-Thunderbirds spectacles. But they all turned out in force for the man who - despite the press photographers' unanimous decision to snap him looking terrible - remains the unconquerable Crown Prince of English prose.

When the first notes of the disco hit the air, the oldsters headed for the downstairs chat bar like fleeing Croatians. The stairwell swarmed with descending Frayns, Pinters and Ishiguros. What they missed was a chance to check out their host's musical taste (Amis chose all the music, which included "You Really Got Me", "Walk on the Wild Side" and - one to enrage his agent - "Chirpy Chirpy Cheap Cheap") and admire the exotic dancing styles of the unbuttoned literati.

The award for Finest Paso Doble went jointly to Craig Raine, the poet and Oxford don, and Redmond O'Hanlon, the disgusting-details anthropologist, whose sprightly duet brought tears to many eyes; Salman ("I can't do joined- up dancing") Rushdie essayed a passionate free-style frug with an unnamed brunette; Will Self settled for a wrist-flapping routine reminiscent of a dolphin greeting a lunchtime herring; and a lively young cove aged 15 bounced around in shades and leather trousers as though dying to get into the next Amis novel. What it all had to do with the workings of literature, God only knows. Fun, though.

My local library in south London can boast that among the crocodile of juvenile borrowers it serviced in the Fifties was one John Major. The Minet Library stands on the corner of Burton Road (where the PM grew up, at No 80), like a comfort blanket in an area of high-rise blocks, distressed gentlefolk and latch-key children. You won't find the new Joanna Trollope or the latest study of cosmology on its shelves (it hasn't had any new books in years) but for mothers trying to beguile their bored offspring, for the agoraphobic, the lost and the lonely, it's a vital resource.

This is not an opinion shared by Lambeth council, which on 2 March unceremoniously slapped a notice of imminent closure on its front door. Money, of course: the new multi-party "hung council" is shutting three libraries to help to pay off the calamitous bills it inherited from the Eighties. But the amount to be saved by the Minet's closure will be just £50,000 a year - hardly a fortune when compared to the council's culturally invigorating new £200,000 "wheelie-bin project". Even more galling was to be told: "The library will continue to house the Lambeth borough archives. It's only the lending library that will close down." Incensed by this grotesque civic myopia, local resident celebrities such as Terry Jones, the ex-Python, Christopher Logue, the poet, Glen Baxter, the cartoonist, David Hughes, the novelist, and Kate Hoey, Vauxhall's energetic MP, are convening a public meeting at the library (40 Knatchbull Road, SE5) this very afternoon to persuade the closers-down to think again. See you at the stamp-out desk.

While we're in council-bashing mode, I must pass on the tale of the Fifty Grand Graffiti. It started in 1988 when York city council took the worst decision of its life and shelled out £1,000 on aerosol paint cans and invited 200 young graffiti artistes to decorate the new city car-park with razzy psychedelia. Things went wrong when 800 determined youths showed up and, having done the car-park, proceeded to blitz the walls of the new supermarket next door; it cost the council £4,000 in damages.

Fast forward to 1995. By January, the Department of Development couldn't stand the sight of the street art any longer. It called in a Liverpool firm called Graffitibusters to get rid of it. OK, said Graffitibusters, but it'll cost you £22,000. Bloody hell, said the department, and it had seemed such a good idea back in the Eighties ... Now the work is done, the car-park is spotless, and the bill has arrived. It's not for £22,000 any more - it's for £48,000. Graffitibusters claims that the work overran the estimated time by four weeks and involved the use of "special chemicals". York council is standing firm and refusing to pay. Would anyone like to take a small bet that within the week the car-park will once again resemble the sleeve of an early Hendrix LP?

Isn't she incorrigible? The delectable Dolly Parton was asked the other day to contribute her handprints to the famous "Sidewalk of Stars" outside Mann's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood Boulevard, to join the other starry digit-impressions, from Monroe's to Mitchum's. As Ms Parton pressed her lovely palms into the soft cement, a colleague suggested, with a certain predictability, that it should not be her hands but her famous bosom that was imprinted in the pavement. "Oh ah couldn't do thayat," Dolly replied with spirit. "Why, some small chahld might fall in an' hurt hisself ..."