EVERY ONCE IN a while over the course of a lifetime there comes a bit of news that leaves you seriously torn between whether to reach for the champagne or the hemlock. Listening to a local radio morning show and discovering that Bill Clinton may soon move in next door is a prime example of what I mean.

There are, I suppose, worse things to have for a neighbor than a president of the United States. A nuclear reactor springs to mind, or perhaps a plant churning out Agent Orange, or a basketball team that has just won the NBA championship, or John Rocker.

"Next door" and "neighbor," in this case, are measured in the distance between Chard Cottage and Glympton House - down a series of winding country lanes, about eight miles as the crow staggers after a particularly lubricative TGIF session at the Blackbird pub in Croughton.

Chard Cottage, two bedrooms with fireplace plus gardens front and back, is the country retreat of the Webbs - myself, wife Elizabeth, and Penelope, Teddy Bear, Ali Magraw and Currant Bun, the resident cats. It is situated on Mill Lane, about equidistant between a millrace in one direction and the Blackbird pub in the other.

Glympton House is the rather more sumptuous digs that Bill Clinton supposedly is eyeing as a presidential - or, more accurately, ex-presidential - bolthole, come the day he packs away the Oval Office humidor, switches off the lights, ships Hillary off to the New York political Rottweilers and hands the torch, or perhaps poisoned chalice, to Al and Tipper or Dubyuh and whatserface.

The import of these two mid-England villages, Croughton and Glympton, in the greater scheme of my life came thundering home on the Wednesday morning that Dan Chisholm on BBC Radio Oxford reported that Bill Clinton hopes to become a visiting professor attached to Oxford University - and he's looking for a home in the area.

Reports in London say the president is house hunting in the sleepy little village of Glympton, where he has a pal - Prince Bandar bin Sultan by name, nephew of Saudi Arabia's King Fahd and his lordship the owner of the 2,000-acre Glympton Estate. A potful of Oxford dons already call the place home.

The White House denies it all and quotes Clinton himself as saying "it's nonsense - a fabrication." Recalling Slick Willy's denial of any sexual relations with "that woman," I tend to greet any utterance out of the White House with the same degree of credibility I accord to flying pigs, the Tooth Fairy and the Second Coming of Elvis.

That being said, I have nothing against Bill Clinton and wish him the best of luck in his next career - except when it comes to settling anywhere within nuclear fallout range of my cottage. The British have an acronym for it - NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard).

In good old American, it's like being tarred, feathered and ridden out of town on a rail: except for the honor of the thing, I'd just as soon pass.

The problem is symbolized in a description of the princely accommodations in Glympton: "The estate is heavily fortified and Glympton House, renovated and used by Prince Bandar, has been designed to withstand bombs, has bulletproof glass and ramps in the driveway to frustrate car bombers."

It occurs to me that you don't make things bombproof and install bulletproof windows and special anti-car bomber ramps unless you anticipate the arrival of people with bullets and bombs and exploding cars and such. And where the forces of evil congregate, the no less pestilential forces of law and order are sure to follow.

An ex-president of the U.S. in league with a wealthy Saudi prince means, in short, problems in spades doubled and redoubled.

For miles around Fortress Glympton, I foresee a future of country lanes awash in assassins, car bombers and other assorted detritus of international villainy, and hordes of CIA, Secret Service and MI5 and MI6 agents and, for all I know, Israel's Mossad, the Arabs' Hezbollah, Interpol, the Arkansas state police and a coterie of traffic wardens.

Having to get through phalanxes of gray-suited men with conspicuous bulges under their armpits down every road, trail, cow path and rabbit run is not the idyllic country life I envisioned when we first sat down to a roaring log fire at Chard Cottage nine years ago.

It's true that the little village of Glympton, with its Cotswold stone cottages and post office cum country store and flowered gardens on the banks of the River Glyme, is little changed from three centuries ago, or even from the days when Bill Clinton was a Rhodes scholar and not inhaling joints at Oxford in the late 1960s.

But if the ex-president-elect is looking for a life as a village gentleman, strolling in Wellington boots along the banks of the Glyme or fly-fishing in its waters, or simply nipping down to the village pub for a pint and a game of darts, he'd best think again. For one thing, Glympton doesn't even have a pub (which for my money makes the place eminently avoidable).

Instead, he will be stuck in Prince Bandar's hi-tech fortress, probably traveling to and from via helicopter to avoid the roads jammed up with all those terrorists and police and secret agents. And probably getting sheeps' eyeballs for afternoon snacks.

(The prince himself took up residence there in 1992, and in the eight years since no one in the village claims even to have clomped eyes on him, let alone met him.)

I suggest that Bill Clinton seek quieter environs, where he can stretch his arms without fear of jostling a grenade or elbowing a spy in the eye, but a bit further afield from the villages of mid-England. Like the Australian Outback, for instance, or Tierra del Fuego, or Pompeys Pillar, Montana.

But as things stand, I'm getting out my NIMBY badge. Hemlock, anyone?

Thought for the Day: Politicians, like diapers, should be changed regularly and for the same reason.

"Notes From A Tangled Webb" is syndicated by: