Iran unbowed

Gstaad   The French have a saying: ‘Il n’y a rien de plus bête que le sourire du gagnant.’ In other words, gloating is for dummies. Hence I won’t be doing it, despite the drubbing handed to the Bercows of this world by so-called common folk. Mind you, at a lunch in a gentlemen’s club in the Bagel on the very day the drubbing was being administered, an Anglo-American friend, Bartle Bull, asked me what I thought would be the outcome: ‘Hung parliament,’ answered the great electoral expert, ruining Bartle’s lunch and driving the rest of the guests to more drink. A month down the road, everything’s hunky-dory, at least for those of us who don’t like to be told what to do by Brussels-based bureaucrooks.

I was on the back seat of a golf buggy being driven down to the marina from my beachside villa through grossly exotic tropical gardens. From the many seaside and sporting activities the resort had to offer, I had opted this morning for the ‘island adventure’. I would be whisked away by speedboat and deposited on a desert island to snorkel or relax, then picked up again two hours later. Driving the buggy was a tanned, virile-looking young man with short hair. Smoking wasn’t allowed on the island, and I was dying for a fag. Sticking to my theory that people with short hair must always be told the truth, I leant forward to ask him if he minded if I had a cheeky fag on the way down.

‘This is the one I was thinking of for you,’ said the lady I might feasibly call my mother-in-law, in spirit at least. We were standing in her stable yard in a dingley dell corner of the south of England which is frozen in time. After driving down a winding track between well-tended paddocks, we found her as we always do, dressed in western-style clothing, tending to her animals in her own little world, far from the madding crowd. The builder boyfriend’s long-lost mother is a consummate horsewoman. I say long-lost because she ran away when he was a boy, leaving him with his father who brought him up alone. He always says he doesn’t mind because he was too young to remember her. Later they were reunited. He can appreciate her for how she is, a free spirit.

The master plan in acquiring our flatcoat retriever puppy Damson was that as folk no longer with full-time jobs we would invest our time in producing a perfectly trained dog. On New Year’s Day the growing gap between intention and reality was acknowledged. Damson is affectionate, fun and beautiful — frequently admired by passing strangers. She is also a thief. We were hosting friends from the sadly deprived country of Italy where they are unable to purchase either chipolata sausages or pork pies, a liberal plateful of which we therefore provided for the lunchtime buffet.

As a member of Bafta, I get sent about 75 ‘screeners’ during the awards season, which is always a treat at the end of the year. I was particularly excited about it this time because of the makeshift home cinema I’ve set up in our playroom. I had fantasies of sitting in there with Caroline and the four kids, munching popcorn as we worked our way through the Bafta hopefuls. However, getting everyone to agree on a film to watch is always tricky in the Young household. On Christmas Eve, my recommendation was a French animated feature called I Lost My Body, which charts the adventures of a hand that’s become separated from its owner.

Q. As a young woman I tend not to wear that much to social events in the evening, but I find that in London the best conversations — and the best connections — invariably happen outside the party with the smokers. I don’t even smoke myself, but if anyone invites me to join them outside I always take them up on it. The problem is that I become freezing, almost blue with cold, after just a few minutes, yet getting my coat out of the cloakroom each time isn’t going to happen when I want to appear casual. What do you advise, Mary? — M.M., London W11 A. Haven’t you ever wondered how partying women in Geordie-land manage to trot along the freezing night-time streets in only a few ounces of clothing?

Journalists exaggerate, often reaching for superlatives to chronicle mildly interesting events. Even so, there are times when it is necessary to become hyperbolic. 2019 was an extraordinary year. As Chou En-lai might have said, it is too early to assess its significance. We will be doing that for at least the next 20 years. Indeed, it may turn out to be one of the most important dates in our peacetime history. The new year has also started with a bang. It was cunning of the government to persuade Donald Trump to drive Dominic Cummings out of the headlines, but that will not exhaust 2020’s disruptive potential. Exhaustion leads one to the end of Christmas.

Last year, someone at US dictionary Merriam-Webster noticed that lots of people were looking up the word tergiversation online. It was because Washington Post columnist George Will had used it in a piece about the US senator Lindsey Graham. ‘During the government shutdown,’ he had written, ‘Graham’s tergiversations — sorry, this is the precise word — have amazed’. It might have been the precise word, but it has two meanings: one is ‘desertion or abandonment of a cause, apostasy’; the other is ‘shifting, shuffling, equivocation, prevarication’. Both are pejorative, taking the idea of turning one’s back on a principle, since the Latin for ‘back’ is tergum. From the context, Mr Wills meant the latter.

In 1991, 67 per cent of 25- to 34-year-olds owned their own home. In 2016, that figure had fallen to 38 per cent. The average house price in the UK is eight times the average wage, this ratio having doubled since 1998. Half of first-time buyers in Britain are now dependent on the Bank of Mum and Dad, rising to two-thirds in London and the south-east. Over the past 20 years, the proportion of people living in the private rented sector has doubled. There are one million more 18- to 34-year-olds living with their parents than there were in 2002. Between the mid-1950s and the mid-1990s (expressed in 2016 prices) the average price of residential land rose from £150,000 per hectare to £1.3 million. By 2007 it was £5 million.