ON THE ROAD to Cheltenham on October 11, rushing through pasture uncannily empty of sheep and cattle, I read both the Guardian's and the Independent's reflections on the horrors of a month ago. I find, like how many others, that I share the symptoms afflicting Ian McEwan: 'In company, conversational monomania; in solitude, brooding worst-case daydreams; addiction to TV news and newspapers'. In my case, radio provides a quicker fix than TV. I sleep with headphones plugged in my ears.

After Stroud, I am alone in the carriage except, I notice, for an upright suitcase on wheels, with an airline sticker looped around its handle. The Dad's Army injunction 'Don't panic!' springs to mind, but my heart is thumping as, ten minutes later, I heave my own suitcase onto the platform at Cheltenham. The guard I tell springs into the train. Seconds later, he strides past me, the black suitcase bumping along behind him. Unattended luggage, passengers are warned, will be destroyed. By what means, I wonder. Fire? Explosives? Compaction?

On Friday morning, Jan Morris is the first speaker at the Cheltenham Town Hall. I greet the sound engineers who, like me, are regulars. Morris, once a rakish, cross-dressing British army officer, now a grandmotherly Welsh retiree, is saying that Trieste is her last book. Beguilingly, she describes the cosmopolitan Habsburg port, now an Adriatic backwater, as a metaphor for her own life.

Edmund White flies in from New York to talk about his life and books. Candid, amusing, unpretentious, he is the flâneur we'd all choose to show us around Paris — no doubt why Bloomsbury commissioned him to write just such a book. Asked about September 11, he says he was woken by a friend phoning with the news and looked out his window to see ambulances ranked in front of St Vincent's Hospital opposite, waiting for victims who never materialised. How is it that he acts on us like a tonic?

John Sutherland is interviewing an uncomfortable Ian McEwan at the Everyman Theatre. He praises McEwan's several pieces on New York's catastrophe and predicts that Atonement will win the Booker Prize. At his, to my mind, rather devious urging, McEwan reads a passage from the novel in which the young protagonist, a would-be novelist turned wartime nurse, comforts a dying French soldier. Was it McEwan's intention to call up shades of The English Patient and, of course, a host of British war films of the 1940s and 1950s? To find out, I would have to read the book. Hmmm.

BBC Radio 4 has come to Cheltenham to record two programmes of a new quiz show called Say the Word. Frank Delaney is the bluff, genial host. Four diffident writers make up the teams. The first round is about the meanings of strange words. Frank Delaney mimes when we should clap. There's a rhyming slang quiz, questions about word origins, a spelling bee: goitre, nincompoop, oesophagus. (Sheridan Morley does not believe he has misspelt elegiac.) But there aren't many laughs. At the end, Frank Delaney gets us to fake them. We do our best, but fail to produce the belly laugh. A BBC producer at the back says she will tell us a joke. She assures Frank Delaney it is clean. It's about an Irishman and the Pope. I flee before the ordeal of the second programme.

At a session called 'War Zones', the suavely handsome William Shawcross, author of Deliver Us from Evil, about the UN, loses his temper when a middle-aged man with a strong Gloucestershire accent says that, having read an ex-CIA agent's book about the CIA's dirty tricks, he understands why people in many countries are anti-American. Instantly puce with anger, Shawcross calls him a disgrace. Were it not for America's unwavering opposition to the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, he says, we'd all be speaking Russian. There are angry murmurs of dissent. I ask the last question: why has there been so little mention of the role of oil in the 'war against terrorism'? US oil companies have long been wanting to lay oil pipelines from the Central Asian oilfields through Afghanistan. Bin Laden resents the powerful influence of the USA over oil-rich Saudi Arabia. 'You're right,' smiles Shawcross. 'We should have mentioned oil.'

It's a relief to listen to George Monbiot, the Guardian columnist and author of Captive State, who actually has an agenda for creating a better world. What's wrong, he tells us, is the displacement of democratic representative government by plutocracy: rule by corporations. Corporate lawyers and bankers run key international bodies such as the World Trade Organisation and the IMF. Privatisation, he says, far from encouraging corporate investment in public utilities, is draining vast quantities of public money into the private sector. We should be using all legitimate, non-violent means to gain democratic control over international bodies such as the G8 and the World Bank. The audience, Guardian readers all, I take it, applauds vigorously.

My friend Joanna arrives in time for the session on the Mitford gels. Chairing the session, Valerie Grove cannot stop enthusing about them, confiding that she has always regarded them and 'Ma and Farve' as family. Over lunch, Joanna groans about the lingering influence of U and non-U — the Mitfords' expression — on her own father, a stickler for rules such as, 'Never wear brown in town'.

Biographers provide riveting cameos. T.S. Eliot spent his wedding night in a deckchair on the beach while Vivienne Eliot trashed their bedroom. The young Count Potemkin, Catherine the Great's new lover, emerged blinded in one eye from a game of billiards with her ex-lover Count Orloff. The dome of St Paul's (the entire structure), Wren's biographer tells us, weighs more than the fully laden Titanic. Back in London, walking with friends across London Bridge, I see the newly cleaned dome against the pale blue sky. It looks about as substantial as a Spode cup.

In Somerset House, it costs nearly $70 for three of us to visit the newly re-created Royal Academy Exhibitions there, reached by a steeply inclined circular staircase: 'The Stare Case', in a Rowlandson cartoon displayed along the way. Men watch agog as fat women tumble downstairs, their skirts about their ears. The uppermost gallery is where the Royal Academy's annual selection was displayed in the Regency period. Paintings originally hung there once again cover every inch of the walls. A rugged Mediterranean landscape by Turner, alongside a Stubbs hunting scene in a forest, pins me to the spot. Barry Humphries is among the visitors, strikingly dressed in brown: felt hat, trenchcoat, tweed suit, and a salmon-pink sweater. I think of Joanna's father, turning in his grave.

As we walk back across London Bridge, The Eye, the giant millennial stainless steel Ferris wheel, which lifts tour ists inside clear perspex pods, is glinting in the last rays of sunlight. The half moon is pearl bright above Southwark. And we can see the sky through the neo-Gothic tracery of the Houses of Parliament towers. I check in my suitcase at the airways terminal at Paddington and catch the Heathrow Express. On the Qantas flight to Melbourne via Singapore, there isn't a spare seat. I am amazed to see on the inflight news the prime minister dressed as a Chinese mandarin. I hurry to connect my headphones, in time to hear the words of a grieving father whose family drowned when a boat loaded with asylum seekers sank off the coast of Java. Some fifteen hours later, I wake to see on the cabin map that we are flying over the same stretch of sea, soon to pass over Port Hedland. There, I am shamefully aware, hundreds of other refugees escaping from the terrors of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein are confined like dangerous terrorists. We airborne passengers are the lucky Australians they aspire to be. By five a.m., each with valid passport and two bottles of duty-free grog, we pass righteously through Immigration and Customs, into the red glow of dawn.