While I am an avid reader of the death notices in The Times — ever hopeful of learning of the demise of various old enemies — I cannot say I take much interest in the hatchings and matchings that share the page with these despatchings. The recent engagement of a young couple of my acquaintance, however, prompted me to keep an eye out for the announcement of this happy event.

Perusing the forthcoming marriages from day to day I became aware that The Times has lately adopted an egalitarian approach to the order in which the listings are placed. It always used to be the case that the couples were arranged in order of precedence as defined by the strict rules of social etiquette. So someone on the staff had to decide, say, whether an engagement involving the youngest son of a baronet would be placed higher in the listings than a pairing featuring the eldest daughter of an Honourable. (The dear old Daily Telegraph still holds firm to this daft convention.) Now The Times places the listings alphabetically (though not in such an egalitarian way that it takes account of the surname of the bride-to-be). This meant that last week, for instance, the rather grand union between Lord Buckhurst, the eldest son of The Earl and Countess De La Warr, and Countess Xenia Tolstoy, the youngest daughter of Count and Countess Tolstoy-Miloslavsky, was placed below that of Timothy Bradshaw and Deborah Diamond both of whose parents are among the untitled.

But it was the content of the announcement rather than its position on the page that chiefly interested me. How many woujld have noticed that the announcement placed the Tolstoys’ Southmoor home in Berkshire, whereas it is, in fact, in Oxfordshire, as it has been since the local government reorganisation of 1974.

Count Nikolai Tolstoy wishes that Southmoor, along with a large chunk of former Oxfordshire, were still in the Royal County. He belongs to an organisation called County Watch which aims to restore the old boundaries. He is pictured in 2006 placing a Berkshire sign at Clifton Hampden in a publicity stunt for the group. It was swiftly taken down. As he told this newspaper at the time: “If St Petersburg can recover its name after years of communism, then communities could be returned to Berkshire.”

This is a view I disagree with, but I am happy that he should hold it. What does seem to me regrettable is that The Times has been seen to join him in restoring Southmoor to Berkshire. (I dare say this was not deliberate; the advertising department will surely have taken the Count at his word on where the village belonged.) Reorganising of the county’s boundaries was still going on when I came to work on this newspaper. One of my earliest news jobs in 1974 was covering a Boundary Commission hearing at the Caversham Bridge Hotel (now demolished), Reading, at which lots of locals clamoured to remain in Oxfordshire rather than being lumped in with the proles of the town. Never mind that this would have meant the continuation of such absurdities as dustcarts being sent all the way from Wallingford, rather than from half a mile down the road. The locals were overruled.

Prior to reorganisation, there was a similar situation in Oxford where a big chunk of the western end of the built-up area was in Berkshire. The county boundary ran just in front of The George pub, in West Way, Botley (which I feature in my Oxford Times restaurant review today). Since Berkshire pubs closed half an hour later than Oxford ones at that time, there was a westward rush of drinkers as last orders approached.

One can understand Count Tolstoy’s hankering for the way things were. I feel especially sympathetic having been brought up in a city (Peterborough) which has belonged in my lifetime to three counties — Northamptonshire, Huntington and Peterborough, and Cambridgeshire. But, hey, we must all move on.

Perhaps Count Tolstoy could ponder the wise words of his great forebear, the novelist Leo Tolstoy (from Anna Karenina): “There are no conditions of life to which a man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees them accepted by everyone about him.”