He sits at the kitchen table, which is the only authentic way to touch down at home in Queens.

The resultant tales from life are stirring reader interest, survivor passions and unease among Britons.

In a party tent poised somewhere between romance and avarice, an auctioneer hammered out the sale of the first of the costly baubles that were scattered as love tokens across the lives of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

The earnest weatherman is even more hilarious than in America because his forecasts of change are even more unchanging, and his wondrous maps are always pocked with countless rain cloud symbols that seem permanently rooted across the beloved isle.

Peter Utley, the newspaper's obituary editor cheerfully checked with Primrose Palmer, his assistant, on the day's soul traffic. The late archbishop from New Zealand sounded promising, it was agreed, but then again it was lunch time, and who knew what had been happening in some now-ending life.

It is "lifestyle" journalism the way Chaucer first invented it, and the Times, onto a good thing, is uninhibitedly publishing articles on the passing of a cuckolded poet, a rock promoter strangely addicted to collecting orangutans and an Italian writer striving "to avoid becoming a bore."