Here, in response to popular clamour, is another picture of my new greyhound, Barney. Aristocratic, lean, the light of intelligence shining in the eyes.... and the dog looks pretty good too, don't you think?

An extraordinary plea reached me from Dublin, Ohio, where sindonologist Sue Benford believes my powers could help to solve a 2,000-year-old mystery. ‘Sindonologist' is the technical term for a scientist who studies the Shroud of Turin, the cloth which many believe wrapped the body of Jesus after the crucifixion and which is supposedly imprinted with his image.

No sindonologist has ever been able to prove how the image, whether fake or genuine, was blazed onto the shroud. For a while, most researchers thought the cloth dated to the Middle Ages, but Sue's painstaking detective work proved that tests had been skewed by a scrap of material added during repair work: the shroud had been darned!

After carbon-dating tests at Los Alamos National Laboratory in Texas, scientists declared last month: “As unlikely as it seems, the sample used to test the age of the Shroud of Turin in 1988 was taken from a rewoven area of the shroud.”

Sue was thrilled, of course, to have her theory proved, but the news throws all the research into turmoil — if the Shroud really is 2,000 years old, why can't modern technology copy the process? One thing is certain: there were no cameras in Biblical times.

Sue's intuition says the image was generated by Jesus's psychic aura.

The theory makes sense — in the 1940s a Russian scientist named Semyon Kirlian developed a process of photographing the human aura, showing that the energy field we emit reflects our thoughts as well as our body. Stunning Kirlian photographs of my aura, taken in the Seventies, revealed flashes of energy, like lightning, connected me to the metal when I bent a spoon.

Sue has acquired fragments of linen made by the same methods weavers used in ancient Judea . Her first notion was to test whether I could project an image, even a faint blemish, onto the cloth by telepathy.

I'm doubtful about that: if pictures appears on cloth when I exercised my gifts, Hanna would be forever bewailing that I'd ruined another shirt.

The second proposed experiment sounds challenging too: Sue wants to wrap an artefact, such as an antique spoon, in the linen, and have me teleport it through the fabric.

Objects do teleport themselves around me, though rarely in the years since I, thankfully, attained a level of spiritual calm. Even at my most overwrought, however, I couldn't demonstrate teleportation in the lab.

Scientists such as the astronaut Captain Ed Mitchell, the sixth man on the moon, witnessed bizarre phenomena around me in restaurants and back-stage dressing rooms, and tried to replicate them under controlled conditions — but you might as well strap Sir Paul McCartney into a brain scanner and order him to invent another tune as gorgeous as ‘Yesterday'. It can't be done on command.

Sue Benson will find a way to unravel the shroud's secrets, I am certain. She is a woman of extraordinary determination, as her autobiography shows: stricken by cancer as a child, she overcame multiple physical handicaps to become an athlete, the world champion power-lifter at her weight.

“Think positive,” I urged Bolton 's Israeli football star, Tal Ben Haim, “and you will score goals.”

Tal was amused: “You do know I'm a defender, don't you?” he joked.

“I'm supposed to be in front of our own goalposts, not the opposition's.”

But in his first match after our meeting, Tal delivered a towering header from a corner kick, to score the decisive goal against Spurs. It was only the fourth time in his professional career that he'd put the ball into the net.

“Phenomenal!” he told me later. “I felt like I couldn't miss. Now all my team mates are thinking positive — they're positive I'm going to score ten more!”

Though I haven't driven for years, I couldn't resist taking this gorgeous 1967 Alfa Romeo for a spin, just to the gates of my grounds and back. The car belongs to my friend Nicholas Meletiou, a brilliant architect whose portfolio of buildings includes the astonishing Holy Cross Church in Nicosia, Cyprus , and the Queen's Club in Londo .

Nicholas adores this car and I think he'd secretly like me to store it in the living room, tucking it up to bed with a nice fluffy duvet.

Instead it's in the garage, and if cars can dream I suspect it imagines it is racing across the Alps, going home to Italy .

I wouldn't fancy a journey through the mountains at its wheel, though — this machine was designed for speed and beauty, not for comfort. Even Nicholas admits that it isn't doing his back any good.

I was impressed by Israel 's ambassador, Zvi Heifetz, at a party this week — and knocked out by his wife, the lovely Sigalia. I couldn't believe the couple have six children.

Zvi is just 47, a veteran of the Israeli intelligence forces and an army Major who emigrated to Israel from Latvia as a teenager. He is campaigning hard against anti-Semitism, which is on the rise across Europe: it's a subject he understands, for he was born in Siberia where his parents had been banished for the crime of being Jewish.

I was intrigued by his dress sense. “Are you sure you're the ambassador?” I asked. “I've never met one who didn't wear a tie!”