"Have a nice day," said an American cashier to a large, flamboyant, jovial customer as he departed with his brown paper bag. "Thank you, but I have other plans," came the instant response.

Conceived in Petrograd (as St Petersburg was named between 1914-24 before it became Leningrad and then reverted to its original name at the end of last century), born in London on April 16, 1921, of a half Russian, half German father and a half Russian, quarter Italian, quarter French mother (and some of his more distant relations were Ethiopian), Peter Alexander Ustinov once said that it was extremely difficult for him to feel British. "I rather think of myself as ethnically filthy - and proud of it." It has been said of him that if ever a man gave the word 'mongrel' a good name, it was Ustinov.

He died on March 28. At his largely attended funeral service held at Geneva's historic Cathedral of St Pierre, his family, his friends, his colleagues mourned his departure but at the same time they celebrated his remarkable and full life. Writer, actor, film-maker, opera director, documentary-maker and raconteur, as his obituary in The Times (London) has it, he "had been everywhere, knew everyone, seen everything, could do everything - and kept his sense of humour about it all. He was a wit, an actor, a diplomat, an intellectual who spoke six languages absolutely fluently, a man of great understanding and of huge, encompassing, Shakespearean spirit."

Knowing people, to him, was the best way of getting rid of prejudices, and knowing people, amusing them, entertaining them and endearing himself to them was what he did better than any man one can now name. He was a phenomenal story-teller with an equally phenomenal ability to make others laugh - never darkly for he always saw the bright side of everything. As he said of himself, "I was always irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me the most civilized music in the world."

This man of many talents, truly a renaissance man, was invited in 1990 by Robert Maxwell to join the crew of his virgin newspaper called the 'European' and submit a weekly column - so to his list of skills was added that of a columnist. Ustinov likened his weekly offerings to keeping a diary, choosing one subject a week for a little over a year. He enjoyed the discipline and the opportunity to ventilate his opinion.One great talent he possessed was an ability to help those less fortunate, particularly children. He had a long connection with Unicef, as a goodwill ambassador and to that organization his loss is great. He was an inspiration to all, and it is agreed by all that he is irreplaceable. His association with Unicef started in the late 1960s, when he received a telegram asking him to act as master of ceremonies at a Unicef concert in Paris, which he accepted. It was during rehearsals for the fund-raising gala that a Yugoslav Unicef official, as he put it, "contaminated me with the happy virus of enthusiasm for this vital cause.

He devoted more and more time to the needs of the deprived children of the world and was impressed by the selfless work of the much maligned international civil servants who had a passionate interest in their work and "who are content with the knowledge of its constructive nature as a moral recompense." His long service for Unicef led UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to once joke that Ustinov was the man to take over from him.

In his memoirs, 'Dear Me', published in 1977 and reprinted eight times, he tells how he became a tireless worker and propagandist for Unicef. "My interest grew out of a dissatisfaction with a life of merely amusing, of merely diverting. It managed to predate the climax of my personal problems, except of course that these had been growing inexorably over almost twenty years.

"It may well be, however, that my consciousness of children's needs was fired by my own observation of a growing family. It was only by watching my own family that I grew aware of many basic relationships between human beings. I became conscious of the need to give affection without an immediate ability to do so. I was too far gone, as it were, in the ways of solitude, to break through the barrier without difficulty. And yet it had to be done. I recognized the necessity." And so he did it.

In 1974, he was awarded the most appropriate appointment for his work with children - to the Order of the Smile. His connections with Unicef continued up to the end of his life.

The personal problems he refers to were probably his two divorces - one in 1950, from which union he had a daughter, and the second in 1971 which marriage had given him two more daughters and a son. He married for the third and final time in 1972, and his French wife Helene du Lau D'Allemans survives him (she once declared to a friend that though she loved him deeply she had to have a holiday from him now and again).

Sir Peter - he was knighted in 1975 - was the recipient of a heap of international honours, a score of Orders and honorary doctorates, the Benjamin Franklin Medal of the Royal Society of Arts, a UN award for his Unicef work, he was made a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in France, and when he turned 80 Germany held a state birthday party for him. From 1968 to 1974 he was the Rector of Dundee University, and from 1992 was the Chancellor of Durham University which he remained up to his death.

Also in 1992 he became president of the World Federalist Movement, and a citizen of the world that he was, he used his access to the world leaders to try to foster understanding, especially among the young. Last year, together with Mikhail Gorbachev, Vaclav Havel and the Dalai Lama, he put his name to a declaration by the Club of Budapest : "The time has come for the world to recognize that war, rather than an instrument for the elimination of terrorists and aggressors, is a crime against humanity." His great regret : "The spirit of the world is altering."

During the 1950s and '60s he lived in London - and in those days where else but Kings Road. In 1971, he moved to a beautiful vineyard at Bursin, near Geneva, where he died last month and where he is buried. He chose to live in Switzerland, because as he said, "I enjoy the loneliness of writing, and Switzerland is a wonderful place for being left alone."

His film appearances are probably what most of us best remember him for - 'Spartacus' and 'Topkapi', both of which won him Oscars ; and his very favourite role , Agatha Christie's detective Hercule Poirot, in three films - 'Death on the Nile', 'Evil Under the Sun', and 'Appointment with Death'. His analysis of Poirot : "Very avaricious, very honourable, and very deeply in love with himself," to which he added, "I am Hercule Poirot."

He is gone, but he has left behind for us ample examples of his sense of the absurd, his many plays, his novels and short stories, his films and a wealth of witty humorous sayings and observations - comedy to Ustinov was just a 'funny way of being serious'.

Afterthought: "I'm convinced there's a small room in the attic of the foreign office where future diplomats are taught to stammer," once said Peter Ustinov referring to the British FO. As for our foreign office, I am convinced that there is a large room on the ground floor where our diplomats are taught to remain expressionless no matter what verbal bombshells are hurled at them.

Examples at hand: US presidential Adviser on National Security, Condoleezza Rice, testifying on April 9 before the 9/11 Commission, "I met with Pakistan's foreign minister in my office in June of 2001. I delivered a very tough message which was met with rote, expressionless response."

Now, Abdul Sattar's successor Khurshid Kasuri, has also mastered the art of exhibiting absolutely no expression. A photograph in this newspaper of April 9 shows him shaking hands with the visiting Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, amiably smiling, with Kasuri's face as immobile as if moulded in alabaster. The Chinese foreign minister was also standing by, and remarked: "The only country in the world with whom we describe our relationship as all-weather friendship is Pakistan." This undoubtedly left Kasuri's facial expression immobile and unmoved.

In the large FO room, our diplomats are also being tutored in the art of 'intelligent anticipation' so that they may be able to level with the sayings of their supremo-general. They must anticipate what he will say, e.g. Osama bin Laden is dead but he may be alive, or Osama is alive but he may well be dead, and refrain from trying to explain to us that he did not say what he did say.

e-mail: arfc@cyber.net.pk