One morning I went to open the webmail as usual and there they were, pages of curses and four-letter words, shimmering in shocking pink, lime green, malevolent black

Urban planning disasters in New Zealand have been much on my mind. I have written about them, among many other things, in a forthcoming book about my adventures there. Unfortunately the contents, absurdly distorted, were leaked in the biggest New Zealand paper: I was a snotty Brit whose one purpose in life was to insult them. The result was a tidal wave of Kiwi hate. One morning I went to open the webmail as usual and there they were, pages of curses and four-letter words shimmering in shocking pink, lime green, malevolent black. This has never happened to me before.

None of the hatemailing horde could have seen the book, and only one was from a Kiwi in the UK. "Bet you won't have the balls to reply to this," he challenged. Well, funnily enough he'd sent it from the local council offices where my mother lives in the Home Counties. I was visiting her at the time and a bit worried by the extraordinary coincidence. Was he a weirdo who would track her? So I rang him up at the council - he'd supplied his name. Just another silly boy. As I ranted from the moral high ground, he granted me poetic justice by muttering "Bugger . . . bugger . . ." at intervals.

What this episode has shown me is that although the internet is good for democracy, it's even better for mob rule. Help was at hand. Those two empresses of the blogosphere, Susan Hill and Madame Arcati, flew to my aid, beseeching their readers to send me online hugs. I would not suggest that their cure has been worse than the disease, but I do feel that, having been flayed, I've been buried alive in chocolate truffles.

Too much Candy?

Meanwhile in London - isn't too much Candy bad for you? The Candy brothers' acquisition of the huge Chelsea Barracks site for redevelopment can't result in anything worse than what's already there - but will it be any better? Their developments behind old facades have been quite good, but the completely new ones are absolutely characterless. The brothers' apartment towers going up between Knightsbridge and Hyde Park, designed by the played-out Richard Rogers (who's also designing the Chelsea site), will exploit the sense of place while brazenly crushing it.

The non-Candy developments in this part of Knightsbridge also fill one with gloom. Much was wrecked here in the 1960s. Might they correct the errors this time round? Not a chance. That thing called The Knightsbridge, inhabited mostly by anonymous plutocrats, is a dead wall of money facing the increasingly amusing - by comparison! - Knightsbridge Barracks. As for the vast sheds put up diagonally opposite Harrods - who gives planning permission to build this junk on landmark sites in the world's capital?

More fan mail

This morning I had a lovely letter from one of my oldest and dearest friends, Pedro Friedeberg. Not that I've met him. He's Mexico's most important living artist and our relationship is epistolary. Of course I had to send him an advance copy of my meditations down under. He speaks many languages, including Latin and High Aztec, and pointed out that I'd misspelt "promontory" on page 212 (I'd put "ary").

In the book, I say that I can't think of a major work of art inspired by hate. Pedro writes: "I do not agree . . . How about Goya, Dante, Céline, Diego Rivera, Orozco, T S Eliot, and many others?" I'm not sure their work was inspired by hate. Hate can be a drive - but surely the inspiration would be something loved beyond the negativity? The furious is when an artist is at his weakest.

He went on - expanding the theme - "I love Cyril Connolly, and Edward James was one of my closest friends in 1962-63. I designed several houses or palaces for him which he never built of course because he was impervious to outside suggestion, thinking that he knew all about architecture, whereas all he was capable of was copying the kitchen of the Royal Pavilion at Brighton."

Pedro, unaware of what I had recently endured, finished his letter with: "If I was the King of Sweden I'd give you the Nobel. But maybe then you'd get too much uncomfortable fan mail."

The author's latest book, "Going As Far As I Can", is published by Profile (£12.99) on 21 February

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