If my career ever goes belly up, I think I'll find work as a waiter.

I'd be useless at silver service: in the best restaurants, the dessert spoon is never knotted around the fish knife. But I'd make a dashing wine waiter, and not simply because the corkscrew is one piece of cutlery that even I can't damage.

At a charity auction a few weeks ago, I was drumming up bids for a superb bottle of red wine from the Golan Heights in Israel . That's a place with memories for me, because when I was doing my national service, before the Six Days War, my unit was detailed to guard the kibbutzes under the Heights. Syrian troops were stationed at border outposts a short distance away from us, and every Tuesday a busload of women would arrive.

A girl got out at each Syrian checkpoint, and I'm sorry to say my buddies and I greeted this weekly event with coarse humour and ribald remarks. We hurled witty observations and cheery banter across the hillside, and I'm afraid our mothers might have blushed to hear us.

The memory of those days was making it hard for me not to laugh as I conducted the auction, and in a moment of exuberance I offered to turn up at the home of the winning bidder and personally open the bottle... if the price went about £1,000.

And that's how I came to be wielding a corkscrew with a napkin over my arm in the beautiful Hampstead home of Sam and Danielle Lipton. Sam is the son of Gerald Lipton, from the tea family who made additional fortunes in groceries and kitchenware. There were 20 couples there, and just about everyone wanted a souvenir, so there wasn't much left in Danielle's cutlery drawer by the end of the evening.

The wine was astonishing, by the way. I had half a glass, and it tasted like liquid gold. Which it almost was.

My old friend Doug Stephan, presenter of America's Good Day radio show, has been staying with us this week, while his daughter Megan collects her doctorate. In the past decade, Doug's tireless work ethic and peerless radio technique have taken Good Day from being the sixth biggest syndicated morning show in the States, to being the biggest.

Wherever he is, he never misses a broadcast, even on Christmas Day.

This week, he's been presenting the show, live across America, from my conservatory.

Doug's dedication has rubbed off on his daughter, because her PhD is a stunning achievement: she now has a doctorate in philosophy from Lincoln College, Oxford, which makes her a princess among academics.

Megan flies back to her teaching post in New York next month, and there is no doubt in my mind that she will soon be a high-brow commentator on American TV.

I nearly missed Michael Portillo at Gemma Levine's outstanding exhibition of photographs from Israel. I was held up in traffic while the former Defence Secretary chatted to my son Daniel at the Osbourne Samuel gallery on London's Bruton Street.

Dan revealed his political ambitions in an interview for the Independent with my biographer, Jonathan Margolis, last month. He is seriously considering the idea of fighting for a prospective parliamentary seat, as a Tory.

I understand that Michael was enthusiastic and supportive, offering to advise Daniel on the best paths to success and adding with an approving smile, "We've been watching you."

As I hurried into the gallery, the former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neill was on his way out, and Michael was only a couple of steps behind. Shipi was parking the car, so I grabbed Michael's arm and shouted out, "Can anyone here take a photograph?"

And Gemma Levine, whose reputation now threatens to topple David Bailey's as Britain's most prestigious portraitist, shouted back, "I think I could manage that!"

Of course, neither of us could get the lens cover to slide back on my new camera. "I don't work with digitals!" wailed Gemma.

"Press a few buttons," advised Michael. It's a technique that works in the corridors of power, and it worked with my camera too.

The show was called Israel: a retrospective, 1975-1985, and the images were for sale to raise funds for Hebrew University, Jerusalem. I treated myself to prints of two politicians who had a major impact on my career, Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan.

Dayan first taught me the value of my dowsing ability, when he sent me in search of buried Biblical artefacts. As my success rate improved, I realised I could be searching for oil and gold instead of pieces of pottery, and it was dowsing that eventually paid for my Thameside home.

Golda Meir dropped my name in a TV interview, and propelled me from an amateur career on the Tel Aviv party circuit to international fame.

I'll treasure both pictures. But it's my own Levine portrait, snapped with my own camera, that is the real prize.