Breakfast at Buckingham Palace with Prince Charles — and a chance to observe at first hand the historic “choosing of the egg” ceremony, as described by Jeremy Paxman in his new book about the royals. According to Jeremy, Charles likes to have seven eggs put before him by a team of specially trained, homosexual flunkies — but he will eat only one.

His Royal Highness is very particular about the consistency of both the yolk and the albumen and would fly into the most awful rage if his egg wasn’t precisely as he liked it, ranting about the parlous decline in civic standards with people not knowing their place and how we might learn a thing or two from Islam, Muslims being renowned for boiling their eggs with rigour and religious discipline. The “choosing of the egg” ceremony was instituted to ensure the heir to the throne did not start the day in a most terrible bate.

We house guests — stern captains of industry, jabbering monks, charming young women in ski gear called things like Corniche and Twix, bearded green gurus, Jim Naughtie and the like — are huddled together at the far end of the breakfasting room and suddenly ordered to stand. The doors swing open and Charles is conveyed into the room on a giant litter held aloft by 10 mute midgets dressed in hessian sacking.

Charles is looking happy enough, muttering quietly to a dahlia called Laurens. He is seated at the top of the long table and we are invited to join him and refresh ourselves with a glass of organic bull’s urine. Camilla can be espied through the window, skulking along a distant hedgerow with a fag.

And then the royal eggs are brought into the room, each covered in a knitted cosy bearing the fleur-de-lys. There are not, as Jeremy had it, seven at all — there are, by my reckoning, at least 200.

Egg No 1 is deposited in front of the prince but he gives it scarcely more than a glance before waving it away. The same thing happens with eggs No 2 through to 78. We begin to discreetly fidget. Outside, the rejected flunkies mill around on the lawn disconsolately, still holding their useless eggs.

Suddenly Charles raps on the table and shouts: “Soldiers!” At first, we worry that he has decided upon a stringent punishment for the incompetent flunkies, but in fact he has selected his egg and is demanding now a procession of even more flunkies, this time bearing plates of buttered toast cut into strips, with which he will address his chosen egg — No 124, as it happens.

The atmosphere lightens. Charles dips a sliver of toast into his egg and yolk oozes pleasingly down the side of the shell. We begin a conversation, instigated (as is only right) by the heir to the throne. It is about new, “alternative” treatments for the barking mad. The “choosing of the egg” has been done — and another onerous royal day begins.

• Pity poor Chris Tarrant in the divorce courts. He can phone a friend if he likes, but it won’t do much good. And nor will asking the audience. Instead, he will end up settling for that last lifeline, 50-50, if he’s lucky.

  The biggest redistribution of wealth in the past 50 years has been effected by our divorce laws and the propensity of family court judges to bung ever bigger wodges of dosh to the ex-wives of errant — or indeed, unerrant — men. Tarrant is the latest in a line of celebrities to announce that he is seeking an “amicable” separation (from Ingrid) and consequent disposal of assets. Let’s see how “amicable” it remains when the lawyers have got their claws into the case, and the claimants. Well down the food chain, in my own case, the lawyers siphoned off some 85 grand from total assets of about £250,000. Amicable? It ended up about as amicable as the Korean war. It was like the battle of Inchon.

  Now, the legal experts are warning people, and especially rich people, never to get married and if they are to get married, make sure their other half is as wealthy. And make a prenuptial agreement even if a lot of family court judges take no notice. Jeremy Levison, a divorce lawyer representing Ingrid Tarrant, has said the current law is “thoroughly hostile to marriage”. No kidding, Jezza. And whose fault, primarily, is that?

  No sense of taste at the Tate

  What would you rather look at in an art gallery? One of Beryl Cook’s humorous paintings of fat, cheerful, middle-aged women and cats, or a few cans of poo from the artist Piero Manzoni? Frankly, call me an unrepentant modernist, but I’d go for the poo, every time; there’s a little more life in it. However, Cook’s aficionados are reportedly angry that the Tate continues to ignore her work, despite the fact that it sells for vast amounts of money (presumably to the well-heeled ranks of blind, or very stupid people).

  They smell snobbery and a disdain on the part of the Tate for what ordinary people, those not in the know, call art and would happily bung on their walls.

  The problem here is that our fine art custodians have made it almost impossible to guard against the claims of Beryl Cook fans by their perpetual support for the even worse, but more fashionable, dross of artists such as Tracey Emin — and others.

  If the mass popularism of Cook is shallow, fatuous and ineptly executed, so too are the products of Tracey Emin’s stunted imagination. And hideous, too. How, these days, should one distinguish between the two?

  Going on a slave trade guilt trip

  The excellent government minister David Lammy may soon find himself in a strange position. John Prescott is to chair a committee that will consider issuing a government apology to black people for Britain’s role in the slave trade.

  Lammy, who is black, may therefore have to apologise to himself. One assumes this gracious man will both say sorry and accept the apology with quiet solemnity. On the other hand, it is not out of the question that he will demand reparations from himself, perhaps vast, arbitrary sums he does not have the wherewithal to pay.

  Should we say sorry for slavery, a trade we appropriated 1,000 years after it had been established in Africa and left, shamefacedly, 200 years later, allowing it to revert to its progenitors where it continues to this day? I suppose, if it makes people feel better and enhances the prospect of world peace, then yes — although of all the myriad terrible things that make me lie awake at night with guilt, slavery comes about 134th on the list.

• Nothing resists television. It will appropriate every sort of misery for our entertainment and then have the effrontery to insist we are all the better for it; art truly reflecting life and so on. Parents incapable of bringing up children displaying their ineptitude in front of lithesome “counsellors”. Fragile relationships demolished in Wife Swap. The fragile egos of the educationally subnormal ridiculed in Big Brother.

  And now the death of Steve Irwin, that taunter of querulous animals, and the injuries sustained by Richard Hammond, the presenter of Top Gear. There are debates about whether Top Gear should be taken off — but my guess is it will not be. I suspect its ratings will rise. We get the TV we deserve.

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