And once you start there's no end to the number of metaphorical uses to which we've put the

And once you start, there's no end to the number of metaphorical uses to which we've put the outer covering of ourselves, the skin-as-persona. The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby", "wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door" (packed in ice?) was clearly 30 years ahead of her time. If what happened to the Melbourne woman were, unimaginably, done deliberately by herself, would you call her self-effacing? Suddenly you realise how much must be at stake for Oriental diplomats to worry about "losing face" and "saving face". The young vicar is dying, and the bishop knows he is dying, and has sent him to live among the eagles and totems to learn the secrets of the tribe ("Each February we come here to clam") and to discover that The Way is Long and The Road is Hard and other bromides so dear to the frontiersman's heart ("There is no word for `Thank you' in Kwakwala ...").The title refers to the recognition of death in Indian culture, as the hapless vicar discovers one night when, having achieved wisdom, he hears an owl getting its hooting equipment round the words "Mark Brian", presumably in the style of Bruce Forsythe inviting a contestant to come on down. The plastic surgeons (obviously the only medically-inclined Australians who haven't decamped to England to become dentists) amazingly managed to glue it all back on again, after packing it in ice, like caviar, and she may turn out to be just-recognisable, now they've sewn up a few thousand tiny blood vessels and nerves and capillaries.The phenomenon of having the outer skin on the front of your head flayed is known by the quaint modern locution, "de-gloved". It's an earnest and desperately solemn piece of work, inhabiting that territory of elemental baloney somewhere between The Horse Whisperer and The Bridges of Madison County, and shows, I fear, that the Duke of York is gradually turning into his big brother.

Healthy red-blooded pursuits, like the action at Valderrama, are battling with morbid introspection for his soul and I hope the former wins. (I Heard the Birdie Four Call My Name? I Heard the Eagle at the Sixteenth Call My Name?)*Revolting news story of the week was that of the poor woman in Melbourne, Australia, whose face was torn off after she caught her hair in a milking machine Yeesh. Behind the pride was a sadness so deep it seemed to stretch back into ancient mysteries Mark could not even imagine") in a village named, with awful portentousness, Kingcome. What can this absorbing volume be?It's by an American woman called Margaret Craven and it's called I Heard The Owl Call My Name (Picador, pounds 5.99, all good bookshops) and it tells the story of a young Anglican vicar called Mark Brian, who is sent by his bishop into the wilds of British Columbia, to hang out with the Indian tribesmen ("There was pride in his eyes without arrogance. According to Peter Alliss, the veteran broadcaster, who hung out with the Queen's second son while filming A Golfer's Travels in Royal Dornoch, Andrew has a thing about a certain novel and he reads it all the time About four times a year, every year, in fact This smacks of morbid self-identification. And there one learns an intriguing morsel about one of the Duke's obsessions. It's a book. It's quite a line-up (and that's before you've started on the golfers).

Looking for further enlightenment about the Duke's prowess on fairway and green, one turns to Golf International, a glamorous new arrival in the suddenly-crowded field of sporting magazines. And even if the party's policy were right, is it sensible? Are the Liberal Democrats really going to campaign for a No vote in the referendum on an elected mayor - and in the process look even more antideluvian than the Conservative Party? Blair overcame similarly entrenched municipal opposition to make the mayor policy Ashdown, in his speech yesterday, didn't even try. First, in a move inspired by little more than the self- interest of the ubiquitous Liberal Democrat councillors, the conference reaffirmed its opposition to the idea of a directly elected London mayor.With one vote, scarcely noted in the warm afterglow of Ashdown rhetoric, the party, described in that rhetoric as the true reformers, leading on a laggardly Labour Party, set itself against one of the most exciting constitutional innovations of the new government. But was it enough? Did the audience understand it in their hearts as well as their heads? Within two hours of Ashdown's speech the conference did two apparently trivial things which rather graphically suggest otherwise. It was, in the end, an appeal for the Liberal Democrats to grow up. He warned against "an excessive concern for our purity." He eschewed the "politics of the tribe".So far so good. He was careful, despite some unrepentant and generalised New Labour-bashing, to affirm his belief that Blair is "serious about changing the culture of our politics." In a gentle but unmistakeable rebuff to Kennedy, he derided the notion that the Liberal Democrats should be content to be a "conventional opposition".