I SEE that with the purchase of the Lesotho III diamond, Tony O'Reilly has, according to one writer, "bought him self a kind of immortality which will outlive his success as a ketchup salesman. The tough, disco dancing Irishman is now officially one of the great romantics.

I (want to say that I) am in complete agreement here. Nor do I see any inherent contradiction between a ketchup salesman and a great romantic, any more than I consider T.S. Eliot's status as a poet diminished by his occupation as a bank clerk. And I am all for Tony's romantic rebellion against the rational control and stifling propriety of Neo Classicism and his emotionally charged impetuous exposure of turbulent feeling at odds with classical principles.

However, the notion of buying a great diamond does not in itself strike romantic resonances within me, and the romance associated with Tony's purchase lies entirely in his buying it not for himself, but for his wife. No romance at all attaches for example to the notion of a wealthy Japanese corporation paying millions for Van Gogh's Sunflowers.

But of course it is to the intangible and unattainable that true romance attaches. I am thinking of Marilyn Monroe's walk, Elvis Presley's irresistibly naive guitar work, the strange affective power of Mozart's enharmonic shift from A flat major to E major in Act 2 of Cosi Fan Tutte; all stuff that cannot be glossed, or bought by millionaires. I am also thinking, need I say, of aurochs and angels, prophetic sonnets, the secret of durable pigments, the refuge of art. After all, this is the only immortality - well, you know what I mean, we've been down that road before.

All right. Now to more serious matters. A young man, Master Martin McKenna (9), of Blackrock, Co Dublin has written to the Editor to ask why this column is rectangular, and not square as its name suggests.

He will be a long time awaiting a reply from the Editor. By tradition, the Editor does not respond to the 60 or 70 odd, some very odd, letters which arrive for him daily, any more than the Ephesians ever wrote back to St Paul.

The column is rectangular because rigidity of form is no more acceptable in this newspaper than rigidity of opinion. More to the point, the sub editors don't like it. Fixed article formats cause immense frustration to people armed for their work with red pencils and scissors (of varying hues). That is why the square is crudely flattened into a rectangle of varying shapes, depending on lineage.

I wouldn't mind too much but the original notion was for a circle.

What?

(I am only putting the word in young Mr McKenna's mouth for dramatic brevity. I am sure he would say "I beg your pardon?").

But yes. Columbus Circle was the original idea. A circular format would immediately intimate to readers an article or series less bound by convention, less tied to quotidian and mundane matters. I don't need Jacques Derrida or Jean le Rond d'Alembert or anyone else to tell me that form and function are indivisible, but a circle would also obviate the need for ugly boundary points and aggressive right angles. Its essential symbolic rounded nature would also more naturally induce musical resonances, allowing for tritonal colourings and cunning decoy canons, with illusions of synchronicity given by the upper voice of the square rooted tempo along with overlapped diminished sevenths.

None of this, apart from some fairly obvious paradox, is possible in a rectangular square and the frustration can only be guessed at when the artist, though dealing "merely" in words, is fully aware of the exciting possibilities offered by other spatial arrangements.

The technology in this office is well able to cope with circular articles, only the will and the imagination are lacking. I wouldn't like to say how my earlier suggestion of a three dimensional tetrahedroid format was treated.

There is of course no excuse for calling a square a rectangle, though there are precedents in the urban mapping area. Rathgar's Brighton Square for example is in geometric terms a quite ordinary five sided polygon, though some residents, whose names are known to the authorities, prefer it described (contradictorily and inaccurately) as an open ended hexagon, despite the fact that its nominal sixth side, the blank end, is actually part of Terenure Road North, and therefore not even in Dublin 6, but Dublin 6W.

P.S. I do not need anyone writing to me (or the Editor) pointing out that New York's Columbus Circle is more ovoid than truly circular. The incorporation of elliptic allusions in the proposed column of that name was to have been part of its unified structure. {CORRECTION} 96042900003