I WAS READING some weeks ago in the London Times about Melvyn Bragg's purchase of a yoke.

Not only did the London Weekend arts guru buy a yoke, but he wrote a column of almost 1,000 words about his purchase, thus undoubtedly covering the cost of the yoke ("comfortably within two digits") many times over.

While Melvyn waxed lyrical (a hopeless job trying to wax ode like) about how the yoke, originally a humble farmyard implement, had been effectively transmuted into art, he himself was transmuting it into an article.

I have not read a single complaint about this column, which indeed was excellent, yet I see a lot of snide commentary on the news that Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, and a far more famous figure than Melvyn, is to be paid an annual £100,000 for a weekly "personal essay" for the New York Times Syndicate.

Newspapers in Australia, Chile, Finland, Portugal and a number of other countries have already bought rights to the column, which began yesterday. Fergie may also occasionally write "Ask the Duchess" columns if appropriate questions are submitted by readers.

I welcome Fergie to journalism and the column writing business. Nevertheless, it is true that column it is has spread like some awful disease through the print media, obliging people who may have interesting opinions on two or at most three matters to regularly churn out 800 words on issues about which they know nothing and care less.

Once, through the medium of a newspaper column, a writer began in obscurity and rose to fame, or more often descended to deeper obscurity and then disappeared. Now, one first becomes famous, or preferably infamous - it scarcely matters in what field - and is then offered a column.

This is all quite reasonable. It puts discreet pressure on the old style columnist to "get a life" and do something worthwhile, i.e. newsworthy, to justify residency within the column parameters when there are famous people ready to fill the space at 10 times the price. Those whose columns are published on the same pages as the Duchess's will take a little more care from now on.

The New York Times Syndicate's marketing manager, John Stickney, expressed a complete lack of concern about the Duchess's lack of journalistic experience: "We thought maybe if she can fly a helicopter she can fly a column."

This seems fair enough, just as long as such thinking is never reversed. Any readers falling out with her views will suffer less pain than co travellers falling from her helicopter.

Everything Sarah Ferguson does is done for the money, but the most appealing thing about her is that she never attempts to disguise the fact.

MEANWHILE I am interested in this forthcoming book by Harriet Rubin, The Frincessa: Machiavelli For Women, reported on in these pages yesterday.

Actually, I am not all that interested. The notion of taking control of one's life by treating it as a war (with children, job and self as the enemies) is deeply unappealing.

The clever title of the book plays on Niccold Machiavelli's most famous work, Il Principe. But Machiavelli would surely have been appalled at the thought of political strategy, tactics and "subtle weapons" being used in the sex/career wars. Though as head of the second chancery in the Florentine republic he was deeply involved in state matters, his more basic concern was in holding on to a decent job to sustain his large family and avoid the horrors of poverty in medieval Florence.

After the fall of the republic and Machiavelli's spell in jail (with torture) this meant courting the all powerful Medici family, at which he was not greatly successful. It was to impress the Medicis that he dedicated Il Principe to Lorenzo, in the forlorn hope of being assigned some office which never came.

And it was the French, out of hatred for all things Italian, who came up with the unflattering adjective "Machiavellian". The man himself was a decent father and husband (if constitutionally unfaithful) and his life's doings were distinctly un Machiavellian. He was a great political scientist and a very fine writer. The bluntness of Il Principe is foolishly mistaken for cynicism.

Just like Fergie, Niccolo was only trying to keep his head above water.