West London, mid-morning:
I sat between a retired general and a retired head of the Foreign Office at a seminar last night, with a lawyer on one flank and the Archbishop of Canterbury's spokesman on the other. This blog mixes in all sorts of rough company.
Scroll down for updates
They were at the Foreign Press Association HQ - Gladstone's old house off the Mall - to discuss whether Tony Blair's ''feral beast'' - the media - is having a seriously adverse effect on public life, courtesy of the Media Standards Trust and the Reuters Foundation, I was there to keep order.
What was intriguing was that all four expert witnesses were, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, passionate about the need for a free press to keep public life honest, citing rapid corruption in countries where this is not so. The debate was peppered with admiration and affection for hackdom.
But that judgment was coupled with some scornful commentary on what the British media actually do in practice on a bad day. Thus Tim Livesey, Archbishop Williams' man, brought along copies of the calm and measured interview the boss had recently given a magazine - the one which the Sunday Times turned into a ferocious attack on US imperialism.
That wasn't the most egregious example of media hooliganism. Sue Stapely, solicitor and ex-BBC producer, who handles crisis management and business counselling for organisations and individuals, said much of her job was to keep many of her respectable clients away from media sensationalism and inaccuracy - and to battle to get even worse inaccuracies off the Wild West, which is the unregulated internet.
Stapely's most famous client is probably Sally Clark, the solicitor wrongly jailed for killing her children who died of drink earlier this year after failing to recover from that ordeal.
Despite issuing a late night statement giving the bare facts and appealing for the upholding of an injunction protecting her infant son and home from being identified the pack went into overdrive.
The child - whose father was away on business - had to run a media gauntlet to leave the house where his mother had just died. The nanny was offered £10,000 for her story, neighbours were harassed.
The coverage was ''dreadfully inaccurate'' though she was careful to stress that journalists had also helped reverse the miscarriage of justice which journalism had helped perpetrate on Clark.
Interestingly, several people in the respectable middle class audience at the FPA thought the Clarks - whose original trial had been prejudiced by vicious local coverage, Stapely suggested - were fair game, and that the McCanns have got what they deserved. Admittedly, these people seemed to be journalists.
Lord Michael Jay, who used to run the Foreign Office, explained that diplomats need journalists and vice versa. Usually they get on well enough until a policy went belly up - as Iraq did - or when there is a fixed Fleet St view which governments refuse to challenge head-on, as over Europe.
Jay once had to persuade an EU official that ''Up Yours, Delors'' was a term of endearment among Sun readers.
Where embassies are guaranteed trouble is when a kidnapping or natural disaster occurs. The routine is now fixed: ''Day 1: shock horror. Day 2: sympathise with the victims. Day 3: blame the Foreign Office.''
Only one British couple among hundreds helped after Hurricane Katrina had complained to the media. Their complaints proved false, but they got all the publicity, he said.
The most cerebral and detached of the night's speakers was General Sir Rupert Smith, who ran British forces in the Balkans with more success than most.
He explained that the media has three characteristics: it is a medium in which a soldier has to operate, like the weather; it is a platform which allows one to address audiences but packages information in different ways; finally, it is a business, filling huge quantities of space at high speed.
This was one point the impassioned Ms Stapely had already made more fiercely. Things have changed in recent years.
Many journalists she knows well are under much greater pressure to get scoops, sensationalise copy, snatch photos, get the tale online faster than the rivals and much else. ''They are required to compromise their integrity'' more, she claimed.
The unstuffy general, who must have seen many nastier things in life than a media witch-hunt, was more urbane about what he called the ''Roman circus'' of a military theatre in which his duty was to get his version of events across to the watching world - without lying.
''I'm not frightened of the media, but you do not have good press relations unless you work at them. ''That means providing a reliable source of information.
''Most journalists are idle, frightened people who will go to my (information) tap to get the answers they want.''
All the same, General Smith deplored simplification of complexity in a globalised world and the fact that ''the views of the corporal in the street saying 'this is happening' are given exactly the same importance as the prime minister's".
He also noted that when his book, The Utility of Force, was published in 2005 British journalists (who hadn't read it) only wanted to get him to say ''Mr Blair is wrong'' whereas American journalists (who had read it) wanted to know how the US could learn from it. I later told him I had read one third of it, before asking for his phone number.
It was Livesey, whom I knew as an FO secondee to the No 10 press office, who was nicest about the hacks, challenging, clever, fun to be with - despite being guilty of the aforementioned sins. The cult of celebrity is media-driven and highly corrosive. ''TV is losing its soul and its sense of purpose,'' he warned us.
But putting things right is a challenge for all society, he said, leaning heavily on Jonathan Sacks' new book, The Home We Build Together. Values are more important than presentation or even competencies - a hint of criticism of Blair there, I think.
He rattled off words like integrity, trust, value honesty over sensationalism and argued the good journalists should have a nose, not just for a good story, but also for what is not a good story.
''Does my behaviour humanise or dehumanise me - or the other (person)? And would my children be proud of it?''
That ought to be enough for one blog. But by coincidence the media issue cropped up again when I dropped in to catch the end of the party being given to mark the retirement of the Commons Serjeant-at-Arms, the wonderfully named Major-General Peter Grant Peterkin CB, OBE.
Despite that handle. he has been one of the great modern serjeants running the Palace of Westminster during a time of reform and upheaval, as Speaker Martin said in a speech before I arrived. Kind of him because there have been rumours that the pair have not always hit it off.
I assume I was invited because I represented the press gallery on a committee supervising this summer's renovations, which seem to be working nicely. The serjeant was always decent about things.
However I get into trouble for reporting a rumour - no more than that - going round the gallery that the Tories might have got the David Abrahams affair up and running in a conversation where Simon Walters of the Mail on Sunday is present.
It had been an MoS scoop and Simon goes ballistic. The names were all there in the latest list of donors and if I was any good as a reporter - instead of being ''pompous and self-important'' as well as useless - I'd have spotted it too. The editor ought to have had me in for a bollocking for missing it, he tells me.
I like Simon, who is a very sharp reporter with his own code of honour. He once thumped a colleague (I was there) he deemed had insulted his wife. But he is not a chap who would have enjoyed the introspective seminar I had just attended - nor it him.
In conciliatory mode I say: "That's a fair reproach,'' which only sets him off again. He repeats his charge several times, then storms off.
Simon would be horrified to know he sounded just like a leftwing Comment is Free blogger. But yet again I have touched a raw nerve for some reason - ''your paranoid-sniffing device", as my old Guardian colleague, Robert Armstrong, once called it.
I go home full of regret to learn that Mrs White has just had an email to a chum bounced back by a censorious filter at a politically-very-correct housing association. Trial and error soon shows her offence is to have used the word ''shit.'' So she inserts an asterisk and smuggles some ''s*hit'' into the building. What would General Smith or Sue Stapely make of such internet prudery?
Teatime, Westminster:
How cross is No 10 about Harriet Harman's performance in the matter of David Abrahams' £5,000 cheque, I am asked? Moderately cross. She didn't rush to own up or to give the money back and it's not clear how she got hold of Janet Kidd's name as an Abrahams front-person - or what Mrs Kidd said when tapped for a donation.
Husband, Jack Dromey, is Labour's treasurer as well as a senior trade union official. But no one has suggested during recent Labour funding rows that hapless Jack knew much, so it seems unfair to me to suggest - as some do - that he might have let the wife take a peek at the donors list.
The Brownites are not going to cut Hattie off though. It's still a maelstrom which could get worse - the Met police are set to plunge in, despite claims that they are reluctant to risk a re-match with Labour on party funding. But there have been signs today that the air may be going out of this one.
The Evening Standard's latest allegations have prompted lawyers letters on Jon Mendelsohn's behalf, and this morning's Telegraph is surely scraping the barrel in printing a photo of Mr Abrahams' shaking hands with the former Israeli ambassador, Zvi Heifetz. It has a story wrapped round it claiming that Abrahams might be a frontman himself for unidentified interests.
Geddit? I don't normally like to encourage my old colleague, David Rowan, now editor of the Jewish Chronicle, who can be too ready to shift a few extra copies by crying antisemitism, as he did when Lord Levy was allegedly abandoned by the Blairites during the last Labour funding furore. Levy was later seen on the Blair leaving party circuit as usual.
But the JC's complaint in today's issue may be on to something. Quite why the boys who run Mossad would choose David Abrahams as a conduit for a delicate shekels-for-Labour scam is not clear and the story is getting the thumbs down around here.
From what I hear we'd all be unwise to ask Mr Abrahams to post a letter. Perhaps that's why he got other people to do it for him. As I type, Radio 4's PM programme has wheeled out my excitable old chum, retired ex-BBC man, Nick Jones, to opine that there is a lot more to come out. I feel encouraged. Meanwhile, Mr Heifetz is apparently saying they just shook hands and, er, that was it. Must be hiding something, eh?
I thought as soon as I heard that teacher, Gillian Gibbons, might face an imminent 40 lashes in Sudan that the media might decide to drop the Abrahams affair and get excited about ''white woman in peril'' instead. In the event the coverage has been quite restrained and it looks as if Ms Gibbons may be spared.
The only rival yarn today was the NatWest Three's guilty plea in the Enron-related trial in Texas. But that development ran against the established meta-narrative that only innocent Brits are unfairly dragged off to George Bush's torture cells. That's a bit challenging, so it hasn't run very strongly.
