JOHN SIMPSON

There are, of course, many things I wish I had done in my life. Sometimes it is a place I didn't go to: Czechoslovakia in 1968, for instance, or Vietnam during the war, or Afghanistan while it was still a monarchy.

Mostly, though, it's the people I didn't meet. There was an old boy at the Chelsea Arts Club whom I used to try to avoid when I was buying drinks at the bar, only to discover from his full-page obituary in The Times that he had been one of the planners of the Great Escape in the Second World War and had made hundreds of drawings of the tunnel and its diggers.

There were politicians such as Kerensky, who led the first Russian Revolution in February 1917 and lived in exile until I was well into my twenties. I could have met him. There were poets like Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Ted Hughes, whom I could have visited, if only I'd got my act together.

But there's one man I still feel angry with myself for not going to see. Here I am, in my room at the Plaza Hotel in the centre of Buenos Aires, having just come back from a quick walk to look at number 994, Avenue Maipu.

It's two minutes away; yet when I stayed here in 1983, soon after the Falklands War, I never managed to make it round there. "Here lived Jorge Luis Borges, 1899-1986" says the plaque on the wall. He was one of the finest writers the Spanish-speaking world has produced.

I love the Plaza still, though it isn't as grand as it once was. When I first arrived with my team, we were nervous. Argentina was a military dictatorship, British citizens were banned and the war was still very recent and painful. We all had the passports of our second nationalities - Irish, US, Jamaican - and had accredited ourselves with Australian television.

But the BBC, though a great organisation, isn't always good at keeping secrets, and shortly before we arrived someone there rang to say that when Mr Simpson of the BBC arrived, could he please ring his office?

As we checked in, an impressive man in a morning-coat appeared, looking like Argentina's ambassador to France. "Welcome," he said. "It's wonderful to have the BBC back with us."

"Ah," I said, "some extraordinary mistake. We're Australian. Well, Irish, American and Jamaican, actually. Not BBC. Can't imagine why you would think such a thing."

Wordlessly, he laid the message in front of me, and I said "ah" again.

"I understand," he said, and paused. And then, in the most grammatically superb sentence I think I have ever heard, he added, "May I say, if you had been from the BBC and had been British, what a pleasure it would have been to welcome you to the Plaza."

Jorge Luis Borges would have enjoyed that. He was a tremendous Anglophile and, though blind, used to greet his British guests with a long quotation from the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, then ask them abruptly where it came from and what it was about.

I have always avoided Beowulf; the reason I read English at Cambridge rather than Oxford was so that I wouldn't have to study it. But I knew about his little trick, and was all prepared for it. "Let's go round and see Borges," I said to our local fixer directly we had settled ourselves in our rooms. "Oh, no, please," he said. "Every Brit who comes here has to go round to see him. It's such a cliché." I was paying, of course, but somehow I didn't want to be cliché-prone. I agreed. And now, all these years later, I regret it terribly.

The English that Borges spoke was excellent, though it had been fixed before the First World War and had a remarkably antique flavour. Even his slang was Edwardian.

He lived in the kind of flat that only writers inhabit, with piles of books and manuscripts on the floor, photographs propped up against the spines of other books in the shelves and dozens of bits of memorabilia from other writers in frames on the few available bits of wall space.

His blindness didn't stop him knowing exactly where everything was; when he would talk to you about Shakespeare or Pope or Blake, or about one of the wild and woolly early Argentine writers whom he admired, he would wave to exactly the place on the bookshelves (or on the floor) where he kept their works.

How do I know this? Alas, only because I have spoken to people who knew him, and collected books of photographs of him.

He died three years after I failed to see him, at the age of 87, and all that is left to me now is to stand in front of 994 Avenue Maipu and stare at the front door, which, thanks to his blindness, he never saw.

But I can, of course, read his books. I like the poems, especially the ones about Buenos Aires, because it is one of my favourite places - a city whose name makes your heart leap, even when you just see it on the destination-board at an airport.

But most of all I love his collections of brilliant, funny, understated little anecdotes about mythical animals (The Book of Imaginary Beings) and crooks (A Universal History of Infamy). And I loved him for his style.

"What do you think about the war between Britain and Argentina over the Falklands?" someone asked him breathlessly once, sitting in the flat which I never got round to visiting.

Without pausing, he answered, "Two bald men fighting over a comb."

Twenty Tales from the War Zone: The Best of John Simpson (Macmillan, £1.99) is out now. John Simpson is the BBC world affairs editor and can be seen around the globe on the BBC World news channel. BBC World is available in 200 countries and territories worldwide and on selected flights.