David Mellor's opinion of a new recording of Richard Strauss's Alpine Symphony was delivered to me this week, via the Mail On Sunday, in the highly appropriate setting of an airliner passing at precisely the moment I was reading his review high above the mountain range that inspired this glorious work. From my window seat on a British Airways jet bound from Athens to London, I savoured a scene that could never have been enjoyed by the composer at the time the piece was written (1915), conscious that this stupendous work of nature was being ignored by everyone around me in the packed plane, most of whom were glued to a witless comedy about baseball being shown on the in-flight video.

Of course, they had seen it all before which is, one suspects, rather what the Mellorphant Man feels about everything to which he applies his critical attention. His judgments are handed down in print, or in his squirm-inducing programmes on Classic FM in a way that suggests there is no corner of the cultural world that can, for him, deliver any surprises. All is known to his mighty mind; no performance can shine further light into areas of creative achievement that for him have always been matters completely understood.

Certainly, no one better understands, he supposes, the merits of this or that compact disc like some snotty schoolboy accumulating marbles or Superman comics, he's "got 'em all". Thus he can say, in respect of Naxos's new recording of the Alpine Symphony, that the Staatskapelle Weimar under Antoni Wit sounds "wonderfully Germanic" an oxymoron, surely "in this glorious music, which has never been better served on CD".

I would take the opinions of this oily oaf rather more seriously if he did not prove himself, from time to time, to be a bit of a thicko. Such an occasion occurred recently when as Private Eye pointed out with glee in its last issue he told readers of his Evening Standard column that the death of Little Nell (which "some wag" could never read about without laughing) occurred in a poem. The Eye didn't add that the "wag" was Oscar Wilde, a fact that one might have expected the omniscient Mellor to be aware of. My delight over this exposure was diminished only slightly by Lord Gnome's jumping to the defence of the odious Jonathan Ross in the same issue a consequence, I suppose, of the editor Ian Hislop having his piggy snout in the same trough of TV licence-payers' money from his appearances on Have I Got News for You. (The trough, of course, will henceforward be somewhat reduced in size as a consequence of director general Mark Thompson and his closest cronies just having awarded themselves very handsome rises.) I would also be better prepared to accept Mellor's pontificating if the brute could write. His Sunday MOS article, for instance, opened with one of the tiredest ideas known to journalism the hackneyed 'bunched buses' simile. "Productions of Don Pasquale are like buses," wrote Mellor; there isn't one for ages and then two come along together." Venturing another clich, I would say that if I had a pound for every time that 'aperu' has appeared in print, I would be rich enough to buy a CD collection to rival Mellor's own. You don't believe me? Try typing the words 'are like buses two come along' into the Google search engine. The result: an astonishing 43,300,000 hits.

"But shouldn't it be three buses coming along," piped up the lovely lady sitting beside me in the plane when I pushed this example of Mellor's punishing prose under her nose. "It always is in London." Is she right? A lot of people evidently think so. Try Google again, with 'three' instead of 'two'. The score is 38,100,100. Clich detection is another of the myriad uses of the Internet.

While we are on the subject of numbers, let me draw my readers' attention, briefly, to something else I invited Rosemarie's second opinion about as we sped home. It was a curious phrase in the first paragraph of the lead story in the Mandrake column of the Sunday Telegraph which, like the Mail On Sunday, boosts its circulation through free distribution to passengers on certain BA flights. The story concerned the Countess of Avon's forthcoming memoirs in which she will "finally tell the full story of the turbulent one year and 644 days that she spent with her husband Sir Anthony Eden in 10 Downing Street". 'One year and 644 days' seemed a very odd way to express a period of time and, anyway, hadn't Eden served less than two years as Prime Minister? A moment's research (Internet again) confirmed that he was in office for a year and 279 days. Someone in the Torygraph office had done a spot of addition, converted the whole period into days, and then forgotten to remove the reference to the year in the text. As it happens, 644 days is still the wrong answer. Eden was Prime Minister throughout 1956, and since that was a leap year, it had an extra day. He was therefore PM for 645 days.

Finally, a mystery. Who is the Duchess of Dundee? The Mail On Sunday reported that she had been expected at Windsor Castle for Princess Beatrice's 18th birthday bash, with her niece Lady Sarah Chatto. The Duchess of Dundee immediately strikes a rather comic note, like the Deaconess of Detroit in a celebrated Monty Python sketch that also featured Lord Elpus. Perhaps that is why W.S.Gilbert chose the name for a character ne Euphemia S. Van Zyl of Chicago in his 1897 play The Fortune Hunter. Also, perhaps, because there was no real Duchess of Dundee; there still isn't. Who can the MOS be thinking of?

What is the difference between an Oxford Bus Company bus and the ones in the clich? Well, they do come in threes but you don't have to wait ages for them.

The point was proved to me last Sunday evening when we reached Heathrow Airport at the end of our journey from Athens. We found a huge crowd of people lined up at the stop for the Oxford service, and the coach in the bay behind them already full.

Among those turned away was a group of 20 or so happy young Italians on their way to the city for this week's Jonathan Markson Tennis Camp. Their courier was becoming worried that they might be seriously delayed and was already starting to mutter about trains.

But even as he and his party prepared to leave, a second X70 came into view. This, too, filled rapidly, at least it did once the driver a solid, unflappable chap managed to instil some order into the crowd which jostled for attention as he loaded the luggage. The scene of turmoil was significantly diminished by the arrival of yet another coach, into which half of the crowd disappeared. This included about half the tennis kids a good thing, since it reduced the volume of the singing (football songs, of course) that accompanied our progress home.

As thousands of Oxford travellers are going to realise in the coming weeks, we have truly wonderful airport services from the Oxford Bus Company. The only trouble which is out of the company's hands is the grisly 30-minute delay caused by the road works at Thornhill Park and Ride.

Best not to get me started on that subject . . .