The townie had just overheard an exchange between a man and a woman dressed in hunting clothes: "Do you feel you have been well-mounted this season?" he asked her

I took a townie to a Guy Fawkes fireworks night at a prep school in the Yorkshire Dales at the weekend. There had been a hunt that afternoon, and many parents had come straight on without changing - there was no actual blood on display, but white silk stocks and classy looking stock pins gleamed and glistened beneath the Barbours.

Townie had a dark green number on, too, but when she got lost in the forest of waxed waterproofs, I was able to spot her in the gloaming by the red Aids ribbon on her lapel. She was heaving with laughter - almost ill with hilarity. She had heard a man ask the woman next to him, without a hint of irony, the following question: "Do you feel you have been well-mounted this season?" Disraeli's Two Nations live on, although divided now along different lines.

This sort of thing seems to be happening to me quite regularly at the moment. Last week, the deputy editor of this magazine asked me for a copy of a radio series I wrote recently about St Paul. Flattered, I e-mailed the producer of the programmes and asked him to send her a set. When he caught me on my mobile about a quite different matter, I was paying a bill at the Balham branch of Dixons and picked up our electronic conversation without thinking. "Oh, and by the way," I asked, "can you give Cristina one?" The woman at the till and I enjoyed a nanosecond of perfect understanding, each immediately aware that the other had caught the unintentional double entendre; polite restraint fought valiantly with laughter in her eyes - and lost. Dixons echoed to uncontrolled peals of laughter.

Justin Phillips's book C S Lewis at the BBC, which I have been reviewing, gives an instructive account of the way the corporation worked out its response to the challenge of the Second World War. When the Ministry of Information put pressure on the BBC to respond to Lord Haw-Haw's broadcasts, the head of BBC radio talks, Sir Richard Maconachie, wrote a stern memo on Christmas Eve 1939 on how "the success of false propaganda with any audience which has access to facts would be a 'short term affair'". Impeccably BBC, right down to the use of inverted commas to put a distance between the author and a slightly slangy phrase. "The best antidote," concludes Phillips, "remained better programming to draw audiences away from him [Lord Haw-Haw] and news that was reliable and trustworthy. Don't fight lies with more lies but with truth."

This polite but critical bureaucratic battle at the heart of the British establishment (the phrase had not been invented then, but those were the days when such a thing really did exist, and the BBC was certainly part of it) took place during the "phoney war", the weeks that followed the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, when nothing much seemed to happen and the whole thing felt a bit of an anticlimax.

There is an eerie feeling of being in a phoney war now. Shifts on the Today programme are becoming like Groundhog Day:

"What news from the UN?" I ask at four in the morning. "Not a lot," comes the return grunt, "but the Americans say they'll have a resolution through any day now." Interviews on the subject have become a real test of intellectual ingenuity; I have run out of new ways of asking the questions we have all been asking since Bush's speech to the UN in early September, and the answers are pretty much the same anyway. It is all becoming,well, a bit dull, really. We get by by returning to the more familiar bread-and-butter stuff of daily news discourse in 21st-century Britain - sex scandals of one kind or another, "What the butler saw" stories, Tory party splits, ministerial resignations, medical advances, the Turner prize, and so on - but if you ignore the Iraq crisis for more than a day or two, you get an awkward feeling that you are not talking about the proverbial elephant in the room.

If they do take us to a real war, I shall slip up a quiet prayer to Sir Richard Maconachie. I am grateful to the C S Lewis book for reminding me that we once had a "Ministry of Information" in this country - think how we sneer at that today in places like Iraq and Zimbabwe.

Outwitting the censors can be fun, though. During the first Gulf war, there was an anti-aircraft gun emplacement easily visible from the al-Rashid Hotel, where the press corps was cooped up. If you put a shot of it in a television report, you could guarantee that a "minder" would tell you to take it out. So we did, often, in the hope that it would distract attention from some of the subtler messages we were trying to get across. It sometimes worked.

Go, if you can, to "Anthem for Doomed Youth", the Imperial War Museum's exhibition of poetry inspired by the Great War. It is very slight - just a few rooms displaying trinkets, really - pocket watches, notebooks and locks of hair. But somehow it pulls off the trick of giving life to the men behind those familiar words that get read again and again at this time of year, as each generation tries to make sense of what happened then.

At his leaving party, the former editor of Today Rod Liddle looked extraordinarily and uncharacteristically healthy. Then I read a piece he had written about being an Anglican. Just how wholesome is Rod going to get?

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