High life

Gstaad The funny thing is that I was at school with a man called Ted Widmer, and I recently read that one Ted Widmer is a ‘distinguished lecturer’ at a New York university and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. The Ted I knew was anything but ethical and dressed rather strangely. Never mind. Whether or not he was a schoolmate, Widmer has written a treatise on the year 1919 and called it ‘1919: the Year of the Crack-up’. It’s very good. Basically, he says that what took place in 1919 shaped the world for the rest of the century. One hundred years later, his crack-up looks to me like a tiny fissure — a chink —yet in a funny way it did shape the rest of the century.

Gstaad My annual end-of-year party in the Bagel was a bust. Too many people brought their friends and I ended up asking men and women to please leave both my bedroom and, especially, my bathroom. I had some very pretty young things drop in. Some even overstayed and — surprise, surprise — there were some items missing after the clean-up the next day. But that was then. I’m now in Gstaad for the duration. The good news for the nouveaux is that it rained like hell for three days, washing away all the snow. Skiing and new moolah don’t mix. Main Street now sounds a bit like Beirut — or should that be Athens? However it sounds, it’s not like the Helvetia of the good old days.

Here we are, 41 years down the road, and I’m once again writing for The Spectator’s Christmas issue. This is a triple one, so I want to make it count. In my sporting days, trying too hard was as counterproductive as not trying hard enough, so let’s see if this principle also applies to the written word. Eighty-five thousand Yemeni children may have died of hunger, and 10,000 men, women and children have been killed, most of them by indiscriminate and disproportionate air strikes targeting civilians, and that murderous megalomaniac Mohammed bin Salman and his Gulf allies are responsible. Just think of the enormity of the crime: 85,000 under-fives starved to death in the cruellest way possible by those overfed criminals in Riyadh. Then picture George W.

New York At times I used to think the place was real. The New York of films, that is. The reality is an urban agglomeration of millions, most of whom have a disinclination to speak English. Then there’s the celluloid city of 42nd Street, Annie Hall, Dead End, Rear Window and King Kong. This is the dream city I keep writing about, the one that stabs you in the gut because it’s gone. And it gets worse when you accept that it never existed in the first place. Like the woman of your dreams who has lost her looks and your best friend tells you they were never there. And yet they must have been, because I lived them.

This makes Brexit take a back seat: hints of ancient life have appeared on Mars. Carbon building blocks and other signs of past microbes are thought to lie in Jezero, a 28-mile-wide crater just north of Mars’s equator. The crater was once filled with a lake that was 800ft deep. Just imagine the sailing that went on among upper-class Martians 3.5 billion years ago. It was warmer back then — up there, that is — and that lake, I am certain, was where the elite met to eat and swim. And sail. We humans have been evolving for some time now, but not really. Only a few decades ago we were certain that the oldest human fossil was a small-brained female by the name of Lucy. Lucy was known as Australopithecus afarensis, and she existed between 3.85 and 2.95 million years ago.

New York   If I wrote this in one of those newspaper diaries about metropolitan life, no one would believe it. But I trust that The Spectator’s readership has faith in me, so here goes. Last week six inches of snow were suddenly dumped on the Bagel in the space of two hours, bringing the city to a total halt. Trains stopped running, planes stopped flying, cars stopped driving. The traffic cops — very short in stature and Spanish-speaking to a man and woman, and appointed to the job in order to keep them off the welfare rolls — gave up and allowed drivers to go through red lights, which turned an already bad traffic situation into complete gridlock.

New York A little Austrian count was born to my daughter last week in Salzburg, early in the morning of 9 November, becoming my third grandchild. Through modern technology, I was flooded with pictures of a blond, fuzzed and pink baby boy less than a day old. The mother of my children, who was flying in from Gstaad, did not make it on time, which was just as well. Like most women, she tends to overreact where babies are concerned. Unlike us tough guys, who tend to hit the bottle and celebrate instead. And speaking of the fair sex, Lionel Shriver is some columnist, the best American writer by far, and she has sure got the #MeToo phonies down to a tee. We’re lucky to have her.

New York   An old-fashioned party is a gathering of friends invited by the host or hostess, who foots the bill. Old-fashioned parties are very rare in New York nowadays. Actually, they are non-existent, having been replaced by the charity shindig: the guests pay, the host or hostess profits, the gossip columns get to write about it, and the charity sometimes even gets to see some of the moolah the climbers paid to get in. Last week I went to an old-fashioned party given by Prince Pavlos of Greece and his princess, M-C. The occasion was the princess’s sister Pia Getty’s birthday. I ran into a lot of old friends I hadn’t seen in years, and sat at a table with four ladies, some of whom I pursued when my hair was still salt and pepper.

New York I now know it by heart. Brooklyn Heights, that is. It takes 35 minutes by cab from where I live on the Upper East Side, and approximately $30. I even walked to the Heights once. One hour down the FDR, turn left on to Brooklyn Bridge, dodge the aggressive bikers and avoid the vendors; it’s a 20-minute crossing, give or take ten minutes depending on the crowds. Once you’re over, turn right and you’re there. The Heights are sedate, leafy streets with fine old homes turned into apartments, lush gardens and lofty harbour views. It feels like a staid patrician neighbourhood where time has stood still since the turn of the 20th century.

New York   In the dark she still looks good. The mystery and magnetism linger until dawn, then you slowly see the lines and the harshness. As with a lady of the night who has smoked 10,000 cigarettes, the coming of the light is the enemy. New York ain’t what she used to be, that’s for sure. She’s a tired old place: upper-class vertical living has gone to seed and the fun honky-tonk side of the city has been gentrified and made boring. As mayor, Michael Bloomberg did his best to ruin the glamour of New York, allowing glass behemoths to bury the Chrysler building, one of the world’s monuments to architectural brilliance.

New York   There is fear and loathing in this city, with men looking over their shoulders for the thought police and hard-eyed women roaming the television studios with lists of sexual predators. There is also dread over the latest exports from the city’s youth detention centres, thanks to Kerry Kennedy, daughter of Robert Kennedy and ex-wife of Governor Cuomo, who is now busy bailing out criminals who cannot afford bail through the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights foundation, of which she is president. This is one hell of a city. While the criminals are being released, the innocent (presumed) are losing their jobs, having been accused of sexual harassment. The 500lb gorilla in the room, of course, is the R-word.

Gstaad   The bells are ringing, the bells are ringing, ding dong, ding dong. The cows are down from up high, where they’ve been grazing since spring. I look at them from my window and they stare back. I love hearing cowbells day and night. Their sound accompanies me as I hit the makiwara. I like it best when the cows cosy up and examine me up close. They have a complete absence of expression: no emotion, no curiosity, serene. The one that grazes just outside my window I call Emily, and she has even more tsuki no kokoro — ‘mind like the moon’ in karate parlance — than the rest. Which is the opposite of, say, Emily Maitlis, the BBC sexpot.

To London for much too brief a visit: a marriage, lunch with Commodore Tim Hoare, and a look-see for a house. Yes, I am returning to live in London, but under one condition. It’s called Corbyn, and if he comes in, I’ll stay away. It’s rather cowardly, I know, but I did live in London during the closed shops of the early 1970s. I experienced the joys of the three-day week, the uncollected rubbish, the hospitals without electricity, and the unions exercising power over the government until a certain Margaret Thatcher put a stop to it. I find it hard to understand how people can root for Labour when the party is now openly a communist one. But its friends at the BBC and other channels, and in other parts of the media, pretend otherwise.

The grandest view of Gstaad and the surrounding Saanen valley bar none — and that includes the vista from my high-up-on-the-hill farm — belongs to an imposing house that was originally a sanatorium but is now a home for the blind. It’s ironic that it is located where only eagles dare, but its residents are unable to view the sights. Such are the jokes that fate plays on mankind. I had just finished a very hard training session and was looking up the mountain at the blind people’s home, which looks like a very luxurious hotel from the outside. My heart went out to the poor folks inside, blind to the magnificent valleys, streams and mountains that surround them.

Perception and reality, truth and falsehood, black and white; nowadays the salivating chattering classes don’t know their arse from a hole in the ground, as they used to say in Brooklyn before the yuppies moved in. Take, for example, the latest kerfuffle about the moon landing 49 years ago. I remember it well because it was summer, I had just acquired my first sailing boat —thanks to good old dad, naturally — and the Americans, under the great president Richard Nixon, were going to land and walk on the moon. As everyone but a few doubters knows, Neil Armstrong was the first to take a step on its cheesy-looking surface, but I have bad news for you loyal readers.

A letter from a reader in South Africa mentions that the writer’s father insisted a white dinner jacket was permissible only in Palm Beach, Biarritz or on the Riviera. I agree and stand corrected, having worn one at the Duke of Beaufort’s bash in July. A heatwave is my excuse. England was a frying pan, I was planning to drink it up, and a new Anderson & Sheppard dinner jacket was hanging Circe-like in my closet. The letter also said that if the Duke is a rock star, as I described him in my July column, then all is forgiven. My South African correspondent would have got a surprise had he been there. There I was, looking like a Grecian version of Fred Astaire, surrounded by terribly young people dressed as if they were going to a formal rave in the Congo.

Some jerk know-nothing writes in an unreadable American newspaper that Greece is back — Athens, actually. He would, he’s an American who probably thinks that the lack of starving beggars in the streets à la Calcutta in the 1920s means we’re back. Have another hamburger, asshole, and stick to Trump-bashing. I knew Athens before it went down, and the city’s not back, just we rich, who are back for the summer. Take my friend Irene Pappas, wife of a Golden Dawn Member of Parliament, who edits a national newspaper. She has three children, all doing brilliantly in their schools, but lives on her salary of €1,050 a month. I wish that some of those people I hear complaining about their lot lived on such a sum.

Gstaad The pastoral heaven of this place can get very dull during the summer months. Green hillsides, neat farmsteads, pleasing breezes, meadows bright with wild flowers amid white-capped mountain peaks; these are no substitute for pretty women or intellectual company. That is the bad news. The good news is that the nouveaux riches and terribly vulgar do not appear during the summer. They’re too busy sweating it out in the south of France or in Marbella. They do show up during the winter months, alas, but the low temperatures keep them covered in chinchillas. To see them in bathing costumes would be too much, even for someone like me who has witnessed some pretty gruesome sights in his lifetime.

This was a real surprise, and on my birthday (11 August) to boot: a grown man, whose parents I used to know and like, wrote in the sophisticated pages of The Spectator (‘Desperate Housewives’) that what women really want is a man with a big house. Golly, you don’t say, for God’s sake stop the presses! Better yet get off it, Cosmo, or pull the other one, no one is that naive, not nowadays anyway. I know I sound jaded, and I’m sure the writer was playing ‘born yesterday’, but just one week before his article I had commented how one can tell a man by the type of boat he owned, or the woman he was with. Gianni Agnelli, the long gone Fiat head, and I used to play this game nonstop over the years.

Gstaad I need it like Boris needs a bleach job. Another birthday, that is. Birthdays tend to make your life pass before you in a flash. As it does, I imagine, when facing a firing squad or a samurai intending harm. I mention samurai because I recently dreamt of living in a feudal society where they ruled supreme. And how happy I was until I woke up. Now soulless bureaucrats rule instead of samurai, and it makes for a crappier world. Looking back — well, there’s not much point in looking ahead, is there? — I regret some things, like missing out on an education in the classics. But most of all I wish I had gone to live in Japan when I was young. I began karate training 55 years ago and have never missed a day except when injured.