But what do I see at the Baftas last night, but scores - nay, hundreds - of men wearing literally black ties? I thought the long versions were reserved for Harrovians and funerals, so I must assume that a) nobody in the film world understands dress code any more; b) they know ready-made won’t do, but tremble to tie their own; or c) a new fashion rebellion has occurred, on a par with the demise of spats.

To be honest, I don’t like it. Never mind the question of what one should wear for burials and cremations, if funerary neckwear is to be hijacked by party people. For ultimate elegance, the shiny facings of the dinner jacket demand a broad expanse of white between them.

And while we’re talking about change and decay, what has happened to the royal accent? When Prince William gave his inaugural speech as incoming president of BAFTA, he sounded less posh than the Tannoy telling us to take our seats. I want my Windsors to say ‘orf’ not ‘off’, and ‘gorn’ not ‘gone’. If they are long to reign over us, we need them to be a different species, Eloi to our Morlocks. Still, one mustn’t grumble too much. At least our future king prefers a comb-over to the shaved bullet head now favoured by the balding. And he – or his valet – can knot a bow tie.

With the Globes imminent and the Oscars only weeks away, I hear from a Los Angeles acquaintance that there is consternation in the gifting suite industry.

The what? Well, it turns out that one of the awards’ satellite businesses is the letting of hotel suites by middle men, who then turn them into Santa’s grottoes, full of nice stuff donated by swanky brands (from whom they also take a fee). Here, invited guests, preferably big movie stars, can come and help themselves to the goodies - clothes, jewellery, you name it - and by using them, add lustre to the giver’s reputation. I name no names, but am told that, in one top-of-the-range suite, it has been considered perfectly normal to part with a hundred-thousand dollar watch if the receiver is a Best Male Lead nominee.

But now disaster has struck! The Man has decided that the moochers must pay tax on their rather compromised ‘gifts’, as the freebies are actually fees for label endorsements. Result: the celebs have been staying away, saying that if anyone pays the IRS, it should be the ‘gifters’.

The sequel? If they want their PR merry-go-round to keep spinning, and their lists to be ‘A’, the middlemen must somehow cover the bill – and the only way they can do that is by raising their fees. But on Wilshire and Rodeo, business is already bad enough. The brand people don’t want to pay more for the privilege of treating guests to their stock – and this has led to an impasse.

Still, if the gifting-suite industry is going south, perhaps that’s a turn-up for those journalists still in work. The other way that brands get profile is by buying favour from the press with extravagant goody-bags. In this department, there has been a definite decline in largesse since the Great Crash 0f 2008. If the designer-marketing men were to divert their resources into the Fourth Estate, I’m sure they would be amply repaid in column-inches. Just don’t tell the taxman.

‘Good morning, sir,’ beamed the taxi driver, ‘and isn’t it beautiful in New York City?’ Where, I wondered, had all the misanthropic Russians who used to run this trade gone? This guy was from Benin, and so full of joie de vivre, he was surely high on drugs or Jesus? ‘Who,’ he said. Jesus, I said. ‘No, no, sir,’ he replied. ‘Aitch you. Hu.’ What, I asked? And he answered by passing me a card.

‘Hu,’ it read. ‘A love song to God,’ and went on to explain how singing ‘Hu’ can expand your awareness, help you experience divine love, heal a broken heart, offer solace in times of grief and bring peace and calm. Just take a few relaxing breaths, then sing it in a long, drawn-out sound. Take another breath and do it again. Repeat for up to 20 minutes ‘with a feeling of love, and it will gradually open your heart to God’.

I gave it a go, and I have to admit – if for all the wrong reasons – that a smile spread across my miserable features. Indeed, I was laughing out loud. Whoo, I said to my new brother in spirit; so who’s behind Hu? ‘He is a prophet, sir, who has written 120 books, and given all the profits to our church in Minnesota - not like all those other preachers who keep the money for themselves. And here is his picture.’ He handed me a crumpled photograph of a bespectacled man who resembled my old accountant and is called Harold Klemp -or Sri Harold Klemp to be precise; or actually, Wah Z, to give him his astral title.

I discovered these facts and many similar from visiting the Hu website, www.eckankar.org. So now I know that the Holy Ghost is called Eck, God’s real name is Sagmud, and if Harold weren’t so busy here on earth, he’d be a blue light in the heavens. And who – or rather, Hu – knows? Maybe it’s all true. On a cold November New York morning, it certainly put a song in my heart.

Every so often, you read about an unfortunate youth who has burnt his or her head to a crisp by the application of some patent beauty product. There was one the other day, who’d frazzled half her face with Boot’s hair dye. Of course, the probable cause was an allergic reaction, rather than any failing by the esteemed chemist - but it just goes to show. You should be careful when you take the chemical route to cosmetic enhancement. I certainly do. Sure, there’s some peroxide in my hair dye, but otherwise it’s as organic as you can get.

Oh yes, I dye my hair – which, admittedly, could sound sad in a man of fifty-one summers. But I like to think that I fly in the face of critics by making no secret of it. You see, I haven’t tried to disguise the fact that my gravy-coloured locks have turned salt-and-pepper. Instead, I’ve made them artificial, rock-star, alley-cat black – all topped off with a silver-grey streak – so that I look (I hope) like the Addam’s Family’s undertaker cousin.

Actually, the streak is the only real thing about my coiffure. It grew back that way, after a nasty spell of alopecia in my twenties – and in fact, it led me to the bottle. Once upon a time, friends would tease me by saying: ‘Your colourist missed a bit.’ But my pal Amanda said it was a positive to be accentuated. ‘Darken the rest,’ she advised. So with rubber gloves and toothbrush, the transformation was effected. And now, when I walk down the street, people stop me and ask if I’m a musician. ‘Yes,’ I lie, since they seem to find the profession so interesting.

I have to say, my own life has become much more interesting since Dye-Day. I get the respect owed at least to a professional assassin. The other day, I even got a compliment from Nicky Haslam. ‘Very clever,’ he said. ‘People notice the grey, and not at the black, so it doesn’t look too obvious.’ Maybe not in his universe, I thought. Then again, Nicky glories in faking it, and maybe he has a point.

We live in a world where the boundaries between appearance and reality have become so hopelessly blurred that nobody knows what’s what any more. As a junior silver surfer, I’m old enough to subscribe to Saga magazine – yet I’m the sharpest I’ve looked since I outgrew The Face. Perhaps I should be troubled by this turn of events. But for the moment, I think I’ll just enjoy the confusion of this new grey – or should that be black? – area.

Did you go to Frieze this year? No, me neither. The relationship between art and money always makes me a bit queasy, so I was content to pass on the chance to walk round several pavilions full of dealers talking twaddle, while calculating their percentage. (Actually that might be a good collective noun for them: a percentage of dealers.) Anyway, the art was free to appreciate - and I’m told, much better - round the corner at One Marylebone, opposite Great Portland Street tube, a former church where any middlemen were keeping a very low profile.

What a terrible name for such a beautiful building And why lose the association with the Holy Trinity, to whom this treasure by Sir John Soane was originally dedicated? It really would have been more appropriate to keep the link, considering the religious nature of so many of the works on show.

The ones that have been getting all the news coverage are Paul Fryer’s crucified ape and his black Christ in an electric chair, but there were Biblical references all over the shop. And why not? Christianity has been a strong thread in Western art - if not a rope - since about the fourth century AD, and these works were less boundary breaking than part of that great tradition. Actually, I spoke to Fryer yesterday evening (Thursday), and congratulated him on his contribution. ‘And now,’ I said, ‘I’m off to see the real thing, instead of your reflections on it.’

I refer, of course, to the relics of Saint Therese of Lisieux, which made Westminster Cathedral their latest stop this week. And damn me, but they’d moved on before I got there, and I’d missed a spectacle so much greater than Frieze.

Now don’t get me wrong. I hold Saint T in as much regard as any other Catholic. I love the way so many of our places of worship display a statue of this 19^th century pin-up for closed-order nuns. But you can see saints’ bones cased in gold and jewels in chapels and cathedrals all over the Europe. No, what I wished I’d been present for was the full-on frenzy of a horde of Filipinos when presented with an object of veneration.

I happened to be in Our Lady of Victories on Ken High Street a few years back, when the Madonna of Antipolo made a stop on her world tour, and the place was mayhem: thousands of Filipinos with video cameras were pushing, shouting, praising this statue. You would have thought the real one had dropped in. (The mother of Jesus, I mean, not the singer.) It must have been like that when the great Renaissance painters paraded their works through Florence on their way to the Duomo.

They say that art galleries are the new cathedrals of this Godless age. But until I see such a fuss over an installation by Damien Hirst, I reckon there’s still plenty of power left in that old-time religion. And as for art dealers, maybe they should all be cleared from the temple precincts - like the moneychangers before them…

Although I dye my hair black – except for my God-given grey streak - that’s for style reasons, not to disguise my advancing years. So in all conscience, I can maintain that nothing is sadder than a middle-aged groover clinging to his youth.

However, that doesn’t mean we crumblies shouldn’t rage, rage against the dying of the light. And if I had the energy, I’d definitely be down the Tabernacle in Powis Square on Saturday 17 October, to join the dance of death that is a gig by Gaz (son of John) Mayall and the Trojans, promoted by RoughlerTV and hosted by Piers (brother of Barnaby) Thompson.

Sometimes it seems like the last few decades haven’t happened. Yes, the old church hall may have been spruced up - and if there is any ganga being smoked, it will be on the street - but the Tabernacle has been a scene for ska since Colin Macinnes prowled the Front Line, living and researching Absolute Beginners.

As for Gaz, he’s been playing the stuff since the Seventies, Piers has been a fixture in this sub-culture for nearly as long, and Ray Roughler could probably remember the Sixties if he hadn’t been there.

For such an old lag of W11, Ray has adapted remarkably well to the modern world. Google ‘RoughlerTV’, and you’ll learn more than you’ll ever need to know about the man. But Gaz is altogether more rarefied, a sort of open secret among certain sets. For more than quarter of a century, he has held a Thursday-night club in Soho - starting in an alley basement before finding a new home at the St Moritz in Wardour Street – and remarkably, he has never tried to expand or change the concept.

Essentially, Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues is a neutral space for toffs, rockabillies and any other passing tribe to put aside their differences in a noisy drinking den. I remember seeing David Bowie and Mick Jagger there, when they were cooking up their ‘Dancing in the Street’ duet for Live Aid. Today, you’re as likely to catch Lords Lambton and Elliot, not to mention Lily Allen. Gaz inspires such tremendous loyalty that it passes down the generations. And thanks to him, the beat goes on.

Paris fashion week beckons, and I expect I’ll be runway fodder at one or two defilée– another of those mystified-looking men being jostled by sharp-elbowed female reporters and bewildered by the various exotics that follow the circus. And for what? For clothes, just clothes. I’ve done a fair few shows in my time, and never noticed any great departures from what can be daily seen on the street. But why would I? Why would any straight man? We’re not really interested in what women wear, except for what it reveals or covers.

So what do we chaps do when the models are strutting up and down the catwalk? Well, I know what I do - and from my recent observations in London, I can report that I’m no exception. We study the models’ anatomies. Or to be more precise - since the girls are fairly scrawny up top and tend to have faces as blank as Gordon Brown’s cheques – we ogle their legs. And the results, I’m afraid, are disappointing.

Take the Issa show in Somerset House last week. Lovely frocks, I’m sure, but the pins beneath them left much to be desired. A dash of instant tan wouldn’t have gone amiss (particularly since they were modelling such colourful confections) and might have concealed a multitude of sins. Leaving aside the bruises, pimples - and one set of track marks, I reckon - I’ve never seen so many scuffed and scabbed knees. It makes you wonder if these girls spend all their spare time scrubbing the front steps. Or, more likely, falling out of nightclubs.

At least Naomi Campbell’s limbs made the grade. As did the rest of her. You couldn’t help but notice that, in her fortieth year, Naomi’s not as skinny as she once was. But she’s all the more woman for it. The high point of the evening for me was watching her return walk, after her final appearance in swimwear. As her buttocks bounced cheekily beneath the confines of her costume, I thanked God for the fuller figure. Bring ‘em on, I say - only drawing the line at the démodeé Beth Ditto.

It’s too easy to say that the age of Botox and Photoshop has breathed new life into ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’. The fact is, Oscar Wilde wrote a timeless fable that will always bear reinterpretation. In 2002, Will Self faithfully, masterfully - and druggily - updated it in ‘Dorian’. Last year, Matthew Bourne brought it back as dance, finally revealing serial murder as Gray’s dark secret. (Feeling hasty, it was the only clumsy touch in the ballet.) And in a cinema near you, you can currently find Oliver Parker’s new film version. Called ‘Dorian Gray’, it’s a costume drama, which – if the critics are on the money – will be in the Blockbusters bargain bin by Christmas.

But what’s this? Into my hot little hand is pressed a DVD by my old friend Duncan Roy, one-time London bad boy, now reformed and busily making low-budget, high-art films in Hollywood. And the title? ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’. Actually, it might better have been called ‘The Reflection of Dorian Gray’, since Duncan takes huge liberties with the plot and draws on many of Wilde’s other works for the script. Oh yes, and he transfers the action to the contemporary art scene in New York, turns Dorian blatantly, rather than implicitly, bisexual – and contrary to Wilde’s original, leaves very, very little to the imagination.

Duncan’s work is strong meat, and won’t be to everyone’s taste, but there’s much to recommend it. The portrait, for a start. Even the classic 1945 movie muffed this one, but Duncan has created a real work of art at the heart of the piece, and one that transforms with just as much effect as it did in prose. Then there’s the fine acting, the classy locations, the claustrophobic intensity. You can tell that Duncan has been in crack dens, kissed rent boys, watched his friends die from Aids. Like Wilde, his art has an integrity born of experience. And perhaps that’s why so many high rollers have lent a hand - with an uptown apartment here, a downtown warehouse there and, in Tracey Emin’s case, some impressive neon installations.

The other day, I told Colin Firth – who plays Henry Wotton in Parker’s effort - about this upstart endeavour, and he was typically gracious. ‘Who knows?’ he said, ‘It may be the David that beats our Goliath.’ And maybe he’s right. After all, Goliath was a Philistine…

You see the world and his wife at the Baker & Spice café on Elizabeth Street. I was walking past the other day, when out popped Simon Astaire, renaissance man of the media age. Formerly a talent agent, PR and rock’n’roll manager – not to mention being the public face of Princess Michael – he has now reinvented himself as a fiction author. Admittedly, his books have a strong autobiographical flavour, but with a CV like his, he’d be crazy not to draw on it.

His novels, he tells me, grew out of sessions with his shrink. A personal journal, concentrating on his school days at Harrow, absorbed him so much that he suddenly found he’d written a little bildungsroman. And this month, Private Privilege – which is in movie pre-production - has been followed by the waspishly-titled And You Are?, a reflection on his forays into Hollywood.

Simon has some great stories from his spells in Los Angeles – like when he took the Alzheimer-afflicted Sir Laurence Olivier to the Oscars, and the old boy had no idea he was being honoured. Then there was the time that Michael Jackson’s people approached him about limiting the damage being done to the late moon-walker. But the best anecdotes are in the new book, and I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you.

I like Simon’s writing style: it’s direct, intimate, almost like a private letter. And I’m full of admiration for his motivation. So many people in the media are trapped in their careers, addicted to the perks and borrowed glamour. Simon will probably never make as much money from writing books as he has from fixing articles and drawing up contracts, but he’s abandoning the celebrity circus and following his own star. Let it shine.

I’ve been helping some friends move out of their very grand house in Westminster and into storage. But what to do with all the stuff stashed in the basement and never sorted as it should have been? The velvet-banded curtains from a bygone colour scheme? The 15 year-old Nehru suits (by Boateng), only needing a nip and tuck to be flamboyantly fashionable again? A journey to the hinterland was required – beyond Harwood Road even, to the Curtain Exchange, which deals in old drapes; and to the furthest reaches of SW6, where Major the tailor follows his vocation.

That’s Andrew Major, by the way - son of the late great Demi, a kind, wise old man of the cloth, who counted Taki among his more dapper clients. Issie Blow introduced me to the shop in the Eighties – it was also frequented by her father, Sir Evelyn Delves Broughton - and when we went in on Tuesday, not a thing had changed: the same muted décor, the same pictures of heroes of the trade, the same lovely ladies in the back room, chalking out patterns on rolls of pinstripe and hounds-tooth…

Indeed, it was a day for lovely ladies. On first acquaintance, the two that run the Curtain Exchange are more frightening than one of Gordon Brown’s smiles. But show them some quality, and they’re at least as sweet as Matron and Sister. Both of a certain age, one is plump and fair, the other slight and dark, and they combine a connoisseur’s keen eye with the business sense of a Soros. If you showed them pearl-encrusted silks, and they were slightly faded by the sun, they would smilingly decline. We offloaded about five of twenty bags, and they suggested that we should donate the rest to a drama group as costume material.

French and Saunders couldn’t make them up. Like Messrs Major, they were true British originals. And it cheered me immensely. The day before, I had walked up and down the King’s Road and been bored to death by its homogeneity. Just another global high street, it doesn’t even have room left for the warren of stalls that was Antiquarius. You have to admit, there’s a lot to be said for shabby chic.