The spring crocuses are opening their spiky purple heads to show bright saffron stamens. I wander through the garden believing that spring may be finally on the way, enthuses the Countess du Ruel. Snow drops blanket the riverbanks and church yards, and soon the daffodils will greet us with cheerful yellow smiles.

Last night I went to an arts event at the Barbican Centre in London. I always forget just how overwhelming the Barbican complex is. When you enter this crumbling vision of the future, you leave contemporary London behind. The Centre imposes its logic on you, and you feel like you've always been aboard it, a vast Gormenghast of a spaceship, rumbling through space for hundreds of years on a mission that its cocooned inhabitants have long forgotten.

The inevitable has finally happened. The second hand bookshop where I used to work on Charing Cross Road has now vanished, replaced by "The Ginseng Centre." It, too, looks like it's given up the ghost. All that remains of my own small part of this once magnificent street of books is a memory. The shop was as dog-eared and musty as the books that it contained and run by an eccentric lady called Natasha.

Thank God, that infamous day of wine and roses and chocolates is over, groans the Countess du Ruel. Long gone are the days when I wondered who might send me a Valentine's card.  Now I view the whole thing with a certain amount of scorn.  And I didn't win the Euro Millions lottery.  So the whole Valentine/ Mills and Boon romantic weekend was a bit piano.

The future of publishing is in doubt. Since Apple's iPad launch just over a week ago, an already heated debate has got hotter. The iPad is essentially a magazine-sized iPhone on which you can read news and books (and play games, and send emails, and watch films…) on a rich colour screen. As a reading device, it's still not up there with that old master of reading technology, the book, but it's a powerful force for change.

Sasha Sykes described it as her "bitter sweet epiphany" in The Telegraph last week, muses the Countess du Ruel. I, like Sasha, eagerly await the day in dullest January when these knobbly and ugly citruses from Seville arrive for marmalade season.  It's like when the Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé!  Bon Appétit... but hurry up, the season's short.

If Goldman Sachs really wanted to diffuse anger about bankers profiting from the financial crisis, they could begin by donating their £1.5b bonuses (in the UK alone) to the Haiti relief fund, suggests the Countess du Ruel. Then they might start redeeming their reputation. Last week Goldman clocked up a five-fold increase in profits to £8.3 billion. Not bad when the rest of us are losing our shirts. They can afford to be generous.

In Rants and Raves the other day, my friend and colleague Mrs. M claimed that "there is nothing new under the sun," writes the Countess du Ruel, " except for serving snail caviar at Oxfordshire shooting lunches." Now it seems there is something new under the sun.  Hold on for it: yak hair.

As each Christmas goes by I find the whole gift giving ritual more and more bewildering. OK, I'm an old misery, but it just feels so unnecessary. We don't really need any of this stuff: these books, DVDs, prints, badly fitting clothes, grooming lotions, and socks…actually, no, socks are good.

Just a few days after the Six Day War in 1967, my girlfriend and I visited Cairo, remembers Mrs. M. We had recently graduated from university and were on the Grand Tour as it was done in those days, i.e. sometimes we were hippy backpackers and sometimes we splurged on a comfortable room.