A funny day today. Started off in police plaza, hq for New York’s Finest policemen and women. We met a reporter from the Daily News who told us all about how they choose which crimes to cover and how to get the colour, the details, the wedding plans and holiday destination of murder victims and car accidentees. It brought back last summer and attempts to make a tease for Court TV about the reporters who work out of the Shack, the line of news bureaus that run along the back of the second floor in police plaza. We have to write about a crime next week, and hustle out and knock on doors and hear gossip and write it down for you people out there, you concerned citizens who need to know.

After the Puzzle Palace I went to see the Dalai Lama. I know, simple as that. I was feeling down, confused, in need of succour from the man the world calls peace and I thought I’d drop in on His Holiness (HH), Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th DL. I went to a press conference at the Guggenheim museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright as Temple of Spirit. Spirit is right when you’ve got Richard Gere, silvery, tufty, waving to you, ‘Hello Everybody’ he said in the blaze of flashbulbs as he introduced HH on the stage of the basement auditorium.

I turned up early, cautious, nervous, the Rookie, and took a nondescript sort of a seat near the back. The beige auditorium and its comfortable seats and soft lighting filled up steadily with welldressed reporters. Covering HH when he drops into New York is clearly a job for the better heeled, the more settled newswriters. Lots of linen, red cotton shirts for the ladies, floppy hair for some of the men (one of whom looked particularly familiar and established, kept nervously putting his fingers in his mouth and clutching his face) a few summer tans, lots of chat and gossip, and when the action started, not too much note taking, this was a relaxing afternoon show, oozing sympathy for the HH.

We were hushed to waiting silence by an organizer of some sort and in the quiet we could hear the approaching sirens of the holy cavalcade. Sirens on new york police cars and big black vans are very noisy and unrhythmic, they leap around, jerking, breaking off into new syncopated, eirgh eirghhs, just when you’re getting the swing. Neenawneenaw – eigrh eirgh – eee ee e e e e eee – whuip whuip whuip – eirhgh eighrh – bupbup whuip --- those are the sounds we could hear approaching us in our beige welldressed liberal party. The sirens stopped but still HH did not appear and just when one of the organizers was briefing the photographers (who were crouched in a big bunch in front of the lectern, just crouching like a big spring with fifty heads, ready to pop up and set off their lights), just when the organizer was telling them to stay out of his aisles the curtain behind the stage whished open, fast as a gust of wind and…..

Pish-pash-pish a few cameras went off but it was a false alarm, it was only rush of Buddhist monks, the HH’s entourage, who had come filing out from the curtain. They did, admittedly, look a lot like HH, in their red robes with saffron inners and their hairless heads, one or two of them knew it and laughed at the photographers. They were very relaxed. I don’t know what the collective noun for Buddhist monks is. I was thinking about this in the nice auditorium looking at the photographers as well. People say PACK for photographers but I think of that as having more to do with the microphones and jabbing nudges of the writers and their notepads, photographers and their cameras and telezooms and flashes deserve a name for themselves. See the excellent. A quiver of cobras, a disturbance of photographers? Monks deserve better, a meditation of monks, came through the curtain making no disturbance whatsoever and just as they were quietly taking their seats, slip, in he came, HH, round from the other side, there was a pause as everyone checked he wasn’t just another Lama and then the disturbance hit flash and razzle-dazzle, the HH was lit up like an electric shock. He waved his arms and laughed – and I have to say this because it’s true, but once in a while you meet people who put on the smile and take in the room and make you feel like it’s all fine, the HH has got that.

Gere looked like a college society president next to the 14th Lama. He came to the front of the stage and after his introduction (when Gere said the Lama was here to do many ‘quite extraordinary things… I went to Washington with the DL, said Gere, and it was quite extraordinary, we had a meeting with the President and the heads of the two parties, I don’t anybody who can unite people as much as HH, quite extraordinary, then we went to Boston, quite extraordinary, I remember the last time the HH was here in Central Park and the whole world came to see what was going on, quite, um, extraordinary, I think this visit is going to be quite extra……… we have a series of Buddhist teaching sessions which, now I think of it, are going to be q.e, a music festival that is going to be full of QE musicians, QE HH, that’s what Gere said, all tufty). So the HH comes to the front of the stage in the cracklelights and bades them to stop for a second. They stop and he looks down, at each of them, and says Hello, Hello, and he walks along and has a good look, this disturbance of photogs is not used to being looked at by Nobel Laureates and they quiver. Then there’s a pause and the 14th raises his left hand and brings in down again, saying, “OK, flash.” And they do, pishpishpish.

The Lama spoke about 9/11 and his three tenets of being the Lama which are about human value and respecting each other and the inner potential of people as people, and his second tenet which is about learning from other faiths and his third tenet which put unBuddhistly reads something like: GET THOSE SWINE CHINESE OUT OF MY TIBET.

The Lama has a way of talking, it’s broken with pauses… “after 9/11… New Yorkers… have shown… an affinity… for each… other… and brought good… out of harm… that is…a Buddhist… teaching.” He has a gentle Indian accent mixed with something more Oriental. Sometimes he rushes through phrases he has said 10 million times since he was entrusted to lead his country at the age of 14 in 1959 when he went on his first diplomatic mission to Beijing to ask for Tibet back. The HH rushes through phrases like “the tibetanautonomousregion” and “mutuallyacceptablesettlement” and “sinceredialogue” but will pause at simpler ones. My favourite bits came when he switched into Tibetan in mid sentence, just swapped from his steady, halting-but-clear English into the singsong jibjabber of Tibetan, and his voice went much higher and became full of life. When this happened, his interpreter (a nice looking man who mopped his brow under the lights a few times and then looked quite inquisitively at what he had managed to wipe from his brow, squinting into his handkerchief) would pick up the baton. One sentence went along the lines of “when my plane landed today I noticed the towers had disappeared. I was extremely sad and would like to take this opportunity to….’ And his voice rose up into Tibetan and he raised his hands a couple of times and spoke for about a minute before his interpreter carried on, “in this public appearance to offer my prayers to all the victims of the 9/11 tragedy and to their families.”

The HH talked about how he had hopes of the new Chinese leaders – Hu Jintao etc – and that China should be welcomed to the world and not isolated but educated and given compassion so she will learn about human rights and the freedom of speech. I know everyone loves the HH and so they should, but this was the first time I’ve really seen him or heard what he has to say and it’s powerful hearing someone so peaceful so truly opposed to fighting back. It was a big fresh wash not to hear American / British military can-do-ism, let’s-go-in-there-and-sort-this-out-all-it-takes-is-a-gunship, to hear instead, “I think the twentieth century is over, I think people want peace now, there is a thirst for peace.” It’s powerful hearing it and I wondered whether Gandhi sounded like that. But I’m also a bit worried because China is filling up Tibet with Chinese people. There are now more Chinese immigrants in Tibet than Tibetans, apparently it’s part of a cunning demographic plan to make Tibet indivisible from China. See this, if you can read the NYTimes online.

(After the HH it was the Guggenheim, blitzing show Picasso to Pollock, just had them all in their on the slopey floor – Picasso, Miro, Kandinsky, Luka, Mondrian, Malevich).