This column does not generally concern itself with celebrities but today I am making an exception (as Janis Joplin once said she was doing for Leonard Cohen at the Chelsea Hotel, in departing from her rule only to be bedded by handsome men).

Television viewers will have no difficulty at all in recognising the young chap pictured with me on this page.

Even I have no trouble identifying Dec and his TV partner Ant, though I might find it hard to distinguish them from each other if they were apart.

As the (ever helpful) Wikipedia says of them: "They are regular presenters on many high-profile ITV1 shows, including I'm A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here!, Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway and the biggest talent search in Britain, Britain's Got Talent."

Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly — to give them their full monickers — were out on the town with friends on Saturday in Woodstock, familiar territory to them, I gather. I fell into their company at The King's Arms Hotel, where Rosemarie and I had gone to wait for our bus home. OK, then, where we had gone to enjoy a glass of wine (as if we hadn't already had quite enough champagne at a party up the road) in the company of the hotel's ever-hospitable host, David Sykes.

Specific cause of celebration for the good-natured group of lads was a wetting of the baby's head. The baby in question was month-old Louis Goodwin, the son of Ant's old friend Paul Goodwin and his partner, Debbie, who live in Bladon. 'Goodie', as he's known, shares Ant and Dec's Novocastrian background, which is another way of saying they are all Geordies. He and Ant actually attended the same school before their career paths divided. Paul is now a site foreman in the construction business.

You may think it indicative of soundness of character — as I do — that two such successful show business figures as Ant and Dec have not cut themselves off from their roots. Their friends at Saturday's celebration made clear to me that each remains very much one of the lads. Their unpretentious warmth and sincerity were apparent in the conversations I had with them at the bar. It may be, of course, that in chronicling the activities of so many other lesser celebrities, they have an ever-present reminder of the dangers that threaten those with even an ephemeral brush with fame.

Since a head-wetting is by tradition (at least by Geordie tradition) an all-male affair, this meant there was on this occasion no return for Ant's wife Lisa to the area in which she grew up. Lisa, a former singer with the band Deuce and later beauty adviser on ITV1’s This Morning, was brought up in Cowley and educated at Peer's School, Littlemore.

Though I wouldn't dream of demeaning Saturday's outing by styling it a pub crawl, it is nevertheless the case that the group did not confine its activities to The King's Arms. The first stop had been at The Crown, farther along Oxford Street, and The Marlborough Hotel opposite was the third and final venue for the celebration.

For my part, the main part of the evening had been spent, very enjoyably, at a champagne reception marking The Independent Woodstock Book Festival. This took place in a house close to the side entrance to Blenheim Palace belonging to the Independent's managing director Simon Kelner. Those present included the newspaper's recently appointed editor Roger Alton. One guest (who shall remain nameless) told me he was disinclined to meet him on account of his support, as editor of the Observer, for the invasion of Iraq. As a long-time friend of his parents, I had no such qualms. Roger told me how much his mother had enjoyed writing for The Oxford Times, for the man (me) she had always called "boss". I replied that the pleasure had been entirely mutual. The by-line Jeannine Alton had always been a guarantee of readability and erudition; it was still much missed as we prepared to enter the second year without her.