If this is Saturday, it must be Bath (rhymes with "broth" if you speak BBC English), site of the Bath Schools' Model United Nations Conference and the second stop, after London, on my spring-break visit to Britain.

I'm in the gymnasium of the Kingswood School, a "public" (i.e., private) school founded by John Wesley. The walls have been festooned with flags of the world, with the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes hanging side by side in an intimacy that may reflect alphabetical order but also evokes the Bush-Blair alliance.

At the rostrum, Nick Hall, a silver-tongued 17-year-old from the Methodist College in Belfast representing Mauritania, is exhorting his fellow "diplomats" to support international action on AIDS, a word that Nick's Northern Ireland accent engagingly endows with an extra syllable.

What brings me to this parley? I'm tagging along with my old friend Mark James, a teacher at the St. Laurence School in nearby Bradford on Avon that is one of the 48 schools with delegates at this model U.N. But as a journalist/teacher fond of busman's holidays, I might have come anyway.

I was curious about the differences between a British model U.N. and the one in Berkeley, Calif., to which I shepherded some students a few years ago during a teaching sabbatical. One obvious difference: None of the junior diplomats in Bath is wearing the native garb of their adoptive countries, a cringe-making form of cultural tourism that reminded me of ugly Americans in Egypt who don a burnoose before squatting on a camel.

Still, the similarities with stateside Model U.N.s -- and the debate tournaments of my youth -- were more notable than the differences.

There were even a few American accents, courtesy of diplomats from Chicago and California. In the debate on the AIDS resolution, which called for limits on profits for pharmaceutical companies, the American kids referred to "patents," the British speakers to "pay-tents." No one had the presence of mind -- or the familiarity with 1930s musicals -- to quip: "Let's call the whole thing off."

Not that there wasn't whimsy amid the wonkishness. One student diplomat lobbied tirelessly for a resolution that would commit the world community to take serious precautions against the possibility of an invasion from outer space. Talk about weapons of mass destruction!

The real achievement of a Model U.N., of course, is not the enactment of imaginary resolutions but the bringing together of kids with similar interests. In Bath as at Berkeley, bright young people were encouraged to flaunt their intelligence without fear of being stigmatized as nerds or mouth-breathers.

At the aforementioned Hogwarts lunch, I was impressed by both the erudition and the enthusiasm of the student diplomats. For a good part of the meal I listened to Julius Bruch of the Sevenoaks School in Kent -- who did remind me a bit of Harry Potter -- discuss, with an adult's assurance, the problems of "his" country, Vietnam.

The accent was different, but Julius reminded me of my political-junkie friends at the same age, when Vietnam was more than another entry in a Model U.N. Who would have thought that a vacation in a foreign country would be such a nostalgia trip?

Back in London, I had an even more personal flashback to childhood: lunch with my childhood pen pal, Paul Gambaccini.

To people in Britain, where he now lives, Gambaccini is an erudite radio and television personality, a sort of Oxford-educated Casey Kasem. The last time we were in touch, he was working for the British edition of Rolling Stone, but I first "met" him through the letter-to-the-editor columns of D.C. Comics, particularly those edited by Julius Schwartz.

Schwartz, who died last month at the age of 88, was a little-known but enormously influential figure in popular culture. As was pointed out in a surprisingly savvy New York Times obituary, he was a literary agent for science-fiction writers including H.P. Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury. Later, as the Times noted, he "rescued the superhero genre from near-extinction in the mid-1950s and helped shape popular characters including Batman, The Flash and Green Lantern."

What the Times obit neglected to say was that Schwartz presided over a sort of literary salon for comic-book fans, publishing their obsessive critiques in the letters columns of his magazines. Unlike letters to "Superman," which tended to come from preteens interested in knowing whether the Man of Steel needed to sleep, those appearing in Schwartz's magazines were mini-essays -- lit crit for comics. No one was a more prolific correspondent than Paul Gambaccini

In those more innocent days, Schwartz had no hesitation about printing the letter-writers' street addresses and so it was that I was able to write to Paul in Connecticut to quibble with his deconstruction of some D.C. story. A regular correspondence ensued, with Paul passing along inside information about upcoming D.C. and Marvel comics. (I remember one letter in which he told me to get ready for the introduction of a villain called the Blob -- "a truly hideous foe." One can imagine George W. Bush referring to Saddam Hussein the same way.)

Over lunch at a restaurant near Broadcasting House, the middle-age pen pals discussed Bush and Blair, trends in the British music business and the future of the BBC. But we found a few moments to memorialize Julie Schwartz, who had once paid Paul the compliment of basing a character on him -- Paul Gambi, the tailor who supplied The Flash and other superheroes with their colorful uniforms.

I suggested to Paul, and he agreed, that in connecting comic-book nerds through his letters columns, Julius Schwartz had anticipated the Internet. Thanks to the Web, today's teenage oddballs can breathlessly compare notes about Manga or chess moves or "graphic novels," the R-rated descendants of the sunny serials published by D.C. Comics. Readers of Schwartz's comics had to rely on the U.S. mails, but we made the same sort of covert connection.

My guess is that quite a few of those comics kids later turned up at a Model United Nations. After all, when space aliens invaded the Earth in the comics they always demanded to be taken to the real U.N.