High life

 New York He came from a wealthy background but was always in trouble. His parents were not particularly religious, but nevertheless insisted that little Jimmy read the Scroll of Torah and grow up to be a good Jewish boy. You can imagine their horror when they found naked pictures of Hedy Lamarr and Brigitte Bardot among the holy pages, the former in Ecstasy, the latter in Le mépris. He was given a hiding and taken to all sorts of rabbis to have his evil side exorcised, but soon after young Jimmy did it again, this time with a really disgusting picture of two girls together billing and cooing like there was no tomorrow. ‘What are we going to do with him?’ wailed his mother, while holding him with his pants down and swinging as hard as she could. And it got worse.

 New York Libyans are among the most civilised people on earth. When a Russian hooker (I assume) killed a Libyan Air Force officer, a mob stormed the Russian embassy seeking revenge. They failed, but not for lack of trying. This time last year, another mob murdered the American ambassador and three others in a similar attack, although no Yankee gal had harmed any Libyan flier. The civilised Libyans also did democracy proud when they captured Gaddafi. They shot him up the bum with an AK47, dispensing with a boring trial. The bad guy that got away is Hannibal Gaddafi, who with wifey used to beat up and torture Filipino servants and intimidate the Swiss government by kidnapping Swiss citizens working in Libya and holding them on charges unknown.

 New York The trouble with driving into the city is nostalgia. Manhattan Island looms into view and it still has the same effect of wonderment as it did long ago. Once walking the streets, however, reality sets in with a bang. And it is a bang! Manhattan is one big building site, cement mixers and drills having replaced the soft tunes of Tin Pan Alley that I first heard when walking to Broadway and 47th Street. Back then it was the haunting voice of Jo Stafford singing ‘No other love can warm my heart’, or Buddy Clark’s mellow tenor voice letting it all hang out in ‘It’s a big wide wonderful world you live in.

Gstaad The Swiss canton of Ticino is holding a referendum on a burka ban, and it is about time, too. Burka, niqab, it’s all Arabic to me, although I understand first hand how deep-seated the hatred of women is in Arab countries and that men wish to cover them up. Funnily enough, when you see these bearded assholes shouting on TV, it is the men who are so ugly it should be mandatory for them to cover up. When I lived in the Sudan and Egypt, a punishment from my father for running up debts — she was beautiful, a famous Hollywood actress, and very expensive, who taught me rather a lot about sex. What was I supposed to do, take her to the automat (the el cheapo of the time)? — women dressed like Europeans.

Gstaad Why are hacks scared to state the obvious? In Britain the excuse is the strict libel laws. But in America? To win a libel case over there one has to prove malice aforethought, and I don’t know many journalists who would admit it and go down the Swanee. Take the case that has been hogging the headlines lately, that of the 2022 World Cup and its Qatar venue. Qatar gets rather hot in the summer, hot enough to kill an athlete exerting himself for glory and the root of all envy. Rob Hughes, a respected football commentator, calls it ‘not a responsible thing to do’. He writes that a small group of men got together and decided that Qatar was the best place to hold the tournament.

To London for a brief visit to meet Spectator readers, as nice a reason as I can think of for getting on an airplane, except for an assignation with Rebecca Hall, my latest obsession among the fairer sex. Our digs in Old Queen Street remind me a bit of my schooldays, not that The Spectator’s building is ivy-covered and red-brick, but more in the sense of a mystical communion with the past. Who knows what goes on in one’s brain, especially when lots of booze and no sleep are the main ingredients left in that tired old sponge. Many of us were raised with a certain image of dignity, nowadays not easily found in the hotspots I frequent. Starting with good manners. No sooner had the party begun than I realised this was going to be old-fashioned and different.

I used to see him in El Morocco, the most famous nightclub of its era during the late Fifties and early Sixties. He was a very handsome man, beautifully tailored and with impeccable old-fashioned manners, and a heavy drinker. Wine, champagne and cognac were his drinks, and vodka later in the night. Although invited to sit at the owner’s table, where only unaccompanied men were permitted, he was never without female company, and what beauties they were. I had made the cut early on, but was never lucky enough to be at that particular table when he was there, and I was too shy back then to go up to him and introduce myself. He was the author of Im Westen nichts Neues, known to the rest of the world as All Quiet on the Western Front.

Gstaad I’ve met Stephen Fry twice in my life, both times long ago. The first time at a dinner given by the then editor of The Spectator, Dominic Lawson, in London, and the second time in a restaurant in New York with the writers Jay McInerney and Brett Easton Ellis. The first time I was completely out of it, the second he was, hence we didn’t exactly connect. Fry has been in the news lately for demanding a boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. His beef is Russian anti-gay legislation. Now there’s a hell of a lot of things that are wrong with Russia — first and foremost all the criminal-oligarchs are abroad instead of in jail — but anti-gay legislation is on the bottom of the pile. Let’s start with the hypocrisy of the bleating.

Just before I left Gstaad for the Greek islands I went to dinner at Eugenie Radziwill’s, whose other guests included the great Barry Humphries and his wife Lizzie, and a couple I had never met before but whose name rang a distant bell, John Sutherland. The bell turned out not to be so distant, the prof having reviewed a book for the Speccie just that week. I was late as usual and when introduced to Susan Sutherland I made the gaffe of asking her whether the professor was her father or her husband. She was an English rose type, very pretty, and smilingly she said, ‘He is my husband’ — without making a face over my rudeness. Her hubby seemed amused and we got along swimmingly at dinner.

On board the Weatherbird off the Peloponnese The old girl groans and creaks as we tack time and again, the breeze right on the nose as we negotiate the turquoise coastline. She’s gaff-rigged and good upwind, the only annoyance being the ubiquitous speedboats driven by fat Greeks who come by for a look-see. From my porthole, I see only green pines and olive trees with the light blue of sky and sea as background. My maternal house near Sparta is now a museum, the main square named after my grandfather, who is among the very few public figures not to have robbed the place blind.

 Porto Heli I am standing on the deck of a 100ft schooner that was built in Normandy in 1931 by Gerald and Sara Murphy, the golden American couple who invented the south of France as a summer playground and who were in the forefront of artistic and literary Parisian life of the time. More important, Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald trod on the exact spot where I’m standing, relaxing rather, surrounded by children and grandchildren, but feeling a bit of a midget compared with the types that once sailed on the Weatherbird.

  Gstaad One possesses youth, talent, fame, even beauty, the other none of the above except arrogance, physical repulsiveness and a sexual impudence that fits perfectly into our pornocentric culture. Both, however, need to quit their respective professions, the former in order to preserve his great legacy, the latter to save the city of New York from one more repellent politician-pervert. I’ll start with the good guy. Roger Federer is among the greatest champions ever, if not the greatest of all time. If one goes by the record, 17 grand slams, he has the top spot by a mile. He’s been — sorry for the cliché — a credit to the game, a great sportsman whose only mistake in my not so humble opinion is to keep competing.

 Thun ‘Mokusoo!’ All 200 of us already on our knees and sitting on our heels in the Japanese ‘seiza’ position remain dead silent at the command. No loud breathing, no movement whatsoever, just ‘mizu no kokoro’, a calm mind, like the surface of undisturbed water. ‘Kaimoku’, the next command, signals the end of inner contemplation, followed by ‘Shomini rey’, where we all touch our foreheads to the ground saluting the father of karate. ‘Sensei ni rey’, is the last command uttered by the senior karateka, which happens to be me, saluting the instructors.

I am about to leave for karate camp in Thun, Switzerland, four days of double sessions lasting one hour and 45 minutes each, with 300 black belts from all over Europe and North America attending. I’ll give you all the details next week once I’m safely back home and on my way to the Greek islands. I know, I know, it’s a tough life but I deserve it. After all, given that I’m a self-made man it is right and proper for me to enjoy my golden years in comfort. (And if you believe that, you probably deem rap an art.

I remember it well. It was August 1952, and I was dining with my parents on the Palm Beach casino’s patio in Cannes, when my father got up and went inside to gamble. He came back rather excited and told us that a friend of his, a Greek ship owner by the name of George Coumantaros, had passed eight hands without garage at baccarat and had won a fortune. (He bought a beautiful sailing boat and named her, what else, Baccarat.) The next day we went out sailing on the Vagrant and news came over the wireless that King Farouk of Egypt had been deposed by the military. General Naguib led the coup, and was himself overthrown two years later by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose pan-Arab dreams ended in tears with his death in 1970.

The long lazy summer is upon us, and as I walk the Swiss hills below the mountain ranges my thoughts are always of the past, the long hot summers of long ago, girls in their pretty dresses, my father in his whites sailing around the Saronic Bay with a ball-and-chain standard flying from his main mast. It meant ‘Wife on board’, which really meant: when I drop anchor in some nearby port, local talent should stay away. Dad was famous, infamous rather, for flying that ensign, because he loved partying with loose women on his boat, and, during the rare occasions my mother would come on board, he didn’t want to embarrass her with the inevitable visitors. After his death, I would drop anchor at different islands and people would ask what happened to the flag.

What was that about London and being tired of life? Or that flickering ecstasy of a long ago memory of being drunk at dawn and watching people going to work? Surely not at my age and in the year 2013, but there you have it. You can go home again, Thomas Wolfe had it all wrong. I felt at home all last week, at Loulou’s, on Gerald Road, and in deep Oxfordshire. Let’s start with Gerald Road, where the Bismarcks gave a Pugs dinner to celebrate Bob Miller’s 80th birthday, Bob being the Duty Free billionaire who — surprise, surprise — is as nice, down-to-earth and sporty a man as he is rich.

A first-round loser at Wimbledon this year will receive £23,000 for showing up. Back in 1957 I got £80 for losing in the singles qualifying draw and getting into the draws for the men’s doubles and mixed. Call it inflation, if you like, but today’s pros outside the top 100 need the moolah more than we did back then. I travelled with two Cubans, the Garrido brothers, and two Chileans, Pato Rodríguez and Potoko Aguirre. We lived at the Shelbourne Hotel in Earls Court, a grubby place that’s still around, and we paid £1 per week for a room without bath. On the Sunday before the championships started, I met a beautiful actress, Lisa G., who lived in Deanery Mews next to the Dorchester. I moved in for the duration and they were furious.

St Tropez To the once upon a time sleepy fishing village, now the focal point for Russian oligarch excess, outrageously ugly super-yachts, and what is commonly known as the scum of the earth, the nouveaux-riches of the 21st century. Yet a tiny but perfect airport for small planes and jets means the 747s that the camel drivers prefer are too big to land and have to use Nice or Marseilles as a result. I am here for the annual Pugs Club regatta, and flew down from Gstaad in Peter Livanos’s chopper, a great machine that slalomed around the snowy mountains in a fog, skipping the dense parts, climbing and diving around protuberant rocks, getting us down from door to transom in one hour and 40 minutes. Sorry, folks, but it’s the only way to travel nowadays.