High life

Fort Worth, Texas To the best state in the Union for the annual John Randolph Club meeting of true conservatives, hip, hip. No posturing peacocks spouting gibberish learned at university diversity courses here, but witty, juicy, intelligent criticisms of today’s cultural sewer, and the part liberals and the enemies of Christendom have played in destroying our society. ‘I disagree with everything you have been saying and doing, you atheists, liberals, diversity freaks and multiculturalists, and I will fight to the death against your right to say it and do it,’ was the common thread which united us few, us happy few, us drunken few by the time the three-day conference was over.

New York The morning routine is now a pleasure. Up early, stretch and bend the creaky limbs, hit the coffee and off to judo and karate. All last week I managed to get drunk only twice, hence there were five such mornings. And what mornings they were: stolen from summer without the oppressive heat. One crosses the park from east to west, the sun flooding the paths with light, creating long shadows to go along with the tall maples and oaks. It’s early, the noise level is nil and one can hear the birds. The leaves reveal autumn’s first golden blush, and I cross over ponds, small hills, groves and spongy earth speckled with papery maple leaves.

New York Here is the 64 million dollar question: is there a moral case against soaking the rich? I can’t think of a better place to ponder such an issue than right here in the womb of capitalism, the Big Bagel, taking into account that within the narrow corridor that is Manhattan Island some of the greediest, as well as grubbiest, human beings live and work. The second richest American, a Nebraskan, says that the state should, but he would, wouldn’t he? I have never warmed to Warren Buffett because behind that cuddly, avuncular manner is a shrewdy who always looks out for number one. I know, I know, he’s leaving most of his moolah to charity, but when you’ve got 45 billion and have your family set for life, what’s the use of trying to take it with you.

New York An English prof. made an earthshattering discovery about ten years ago — that there is a strong link between having money fall upon you and being happy. No, he didn’t win a Nobel for it, nor for the conclusion to his findings, which was that money buys autonomy and independence. The prof. should have won a Nobel Prize for excessive stupidity instead, especially for his last neologism, that ‘to turn a really unhappy person into a very happy person using money alone would take about £1 million’. I ain’t so sure about the last one. I gave a member of my family much more than one million quid 20 years ago and the guy is still miserable and angry — mostly at yours truly. That arch-phoney Sigmund Freud was on my side on money matters.

Over the years, I’ve often written about Israel and not always in a flattering light. After President Rabin was assassinated — his wife once told me that she preferred Arafat to Netanyahu any day — I lost all hope that reason, wisdom and humanity might prevail in the Holy Land. I keep returning to a subject that does not exactly endear me to my Jewish friends partly because the mistreatment of the Palestinians offends my sense of justice. People often warn me to lay off. ‘Don’t get involved, it’s the last thing you need,’ they say. I have a pat answer. ‘A Palestinian mother who loses a husband or a child to a bullet cries as bitterly as a Jewish one.

Gstaad One of the safest countries on earth is in trouble. Good old Helvetia, a country more upside-down than sideways, according to Papa, could end up on its head. Its industrial base might melt as its currency is much too strong for its own good, and deflation might set in as the Swiss National Bank is printing good money to tie its fortune to the euro. Lashing the franc to the euro seems a suicidal thing to do, but such are the joys of global finance. Mind you, I don’t understand a thing and am on my way down to see some bankers who will explain things, not that I trust bankers as much as I used to. Still, buying foreign currencies in unlimited quantities to win respite for its exporters is a dangerous practice, something the Swiss are not known for.

Gstaad This is the worst news I’ve had since the surrender at Stalingrad. The Spectator’s deputy editor has become engaged to a former adviser to my favourite minister, Iain Duncan Smith. But how can this be when the deputy editor is already engaged to me? If true, what does it make her — words fail me — a bigatrothed? All I know is that I’m flying to London in order to investigate. If the worst comes to the worst I am going to hit my rival so hard he’s going to have to look up to tie his shoelaces. Enough said. I could also sue, but it ain’t my style. Although I’ve heard rumours that my rival is a habitual user of body wax, I will not get personal.

To Aix-en-Provence for a young friend’s wedding to a celebrity DJ in a beautiful tent in an olive grove. A short chat with the beautiful Kate Moss and her hubby, followed by some heavy boozing under the disapproving eyes of my two children and their mother. Aix is a beautiful old town with many parts still unspoiled, but crowded over the weekend. I stayed on my boat in Marseilles and really enjoyed myself because of the kids being around. Fun is fun, but September promises not to be so, what with the euro about to collapse along with Greece and the rest of the PIGS. Papa Hemingway described going broke as ‘slowly at first, then all of a sudden’. Today the international system is in dangerous turmoil.

Gstaad It’s been very sunny and hot, with the bluest of blue skies above and the greenest of green mountains around me; in fact, it does not get any better than this. The farmers have cut their grass and packed it for the winter’s feed, soon the cows will be coming down from the hills, and the Swiss franc will continue going through the roof. Life is now so expensive in Switzerland that even the rich are starting to complain. Forty pounds for a grilled cheese on the terrace of a top hotel is a bit steep, unless one has access to the Gaddafi sovereign wealth fund, which some Swiss bankers I am sure do.

Gstaad Forget about Libya, and don’t even think about Syria, the mother of all battles is about to take place right here, in bucolic Gstaad, a place of terminal political incorrectness — until recently, that is. But before I begin, the Beguine is far more likely to see Saif Gaddafi than this glitzy Mecca of the nouveaux riches, the Beguine being a religious order in the Netherlands, where The Hague Criminal Court is situated.Personally, I’d rather see Libyan justice meted out, and pronto. Like hanging a jockstrap out to dry, if you get my drift.

Gstaad Blah, blah, blah! I’ve heard it all before. We are all swivel-eyed fanatics, racists and right-wing extremists. And we’re also bigots because we believe in Jesus Christ. Today is my name day, the Day of the Assumption, but please don’t ask me how my parents got Taki out of it — Panagia, Panagiotaki, Taki — that is all I can tell you in my limited English. So I stepped out into my garden overlooking the wooded hills of Gstaad early this morning and began yelling Allahu Akbar at the top of my voice, like those nice guys do down south and also in London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Stockholm, Copenhagen and other major western cities they pay for their keep.

On board S/Y Bushido According to C.M. Bowra, gold had a divine association with the Ancient Greeks, being more than just a symbolic value, as when Pindar wished to stress the splendour of something he called it golden, whether it was a victor’s crown of wild olives or the opening of a song. Gold stood for wealth in its most magical and least prosaic form, for the radiance it invested in the art of living and for the graces it made possible. I wonder what Pindar would say about gold if he were around nowadays! Bowra also writes that according to Xenophanes, a social critic of the time, Lydian gold had a harmful effect on Greeks living in Asia Minor, turning the Hellenes into ‘preys of useless luxuries’, and therefore preys to conquest and tyranny.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the art of seduction On board S/Y Bushido The smell of pine wafting from the shore, the whitewashed and sun-bleached terracotta houses shimmering in the midday heat — both remind me of the simple island life during the good old days, before super yachts, oligarchs and the brain-jolting cacophony of modern music emanating from so-called clubs. I’m lying off the eastern side of the Peloponnese, far from the fleshpots of Spetse and Porto Heli, having done them all last week. And I finally have my mail and The Spectator and I am happy at last. But only for a minute. I read a New York rag that describes Dominique Strauss-Kahn as a great seducer, and I turn into Orlando Furioso quicker than you can say Errol Flynn.

On board S/Y Bushido The thickly pine-forested hills form a perfect backdrop to the not so wine-dark waters off the Peloponnese. Soft greens and blues are Edward Hopper colours — as is the yellowish-white sunlight at midday, the inviolate stillness of noon being a keynote of his paintings. The sea in Greece is mystically wedded to the mountains, the craggy peaks acting as phallic domes to her femininity. The beauty of sailing is the absence of other people, the lack of noise and crowds, the solitude, the presence of only water and nature — but for the occasional bore who speeds by in a stinkpot.

Taki lives the High life On board S/Y Bushido, off Corfu From my porthole I can see Roger Taylor — drummer of Queen — talking to his three blonde and beautiful daughters. The eldest, Rory, has just become a doctor, the other two are still kids, and there are also two very talented boys, not on board Tiger Lily, his boat. One of his sons is an extremely talented drummer, which I guess goes with the territory, as they say. Rock stars do not for typical loving families make, but Roger’s seems to be an exception. Speaking of rockers, I could not have been more pleased about that turd Charlie Gilmour getting 16 months. I know, I know, he’s young and he was upset about his real old man, but this is lawyer bs.

Taki lives the High life Porto Montenegro My friend John Sutin, the world’s most generous man, could not believe his ears. The Tivat airport in Montenegro was full and his private jet was not allowed to land. ‘Try Dubrovnik,’ was the message. So we did, the Croatian airport welcoming us by rushing us through customs as if we were big shots, rather than Nat Rothschild’s guests in neighbouring Montenegro. A one-hour car trip saw us reach the Bay of Kotor, where the three-day-and-night bash to celebrate Nat’s 40th was taking place. The reason we were refused landing rights was that more than 80 private jets had already booked parking spaces, a fact that had me momentarily thinking of the notorious Carlos, of terrorist infamy.

Exactly 50 years ago last Friday night going into Saturday morning — 1 July into the 2nd — in Ketchum, Idaho, Ernest Hemingway asked his wife Mary to sing an Italian song, ‘Tutti mi chiamano bionda’, everyone calls me blondie. After they had both gone up to bed he silently padded down the stairs, stepping softly so as to make no sound, went to the basement storage room, took out a double-barrelled shotgun, inserted two shells, went back up to the hall, leaned against the hard steel with his forehead and pulled the trigger. The newspapers reported it as an accident. I read about it the next day in my aunt Sophia’s garden in Athens, and decided right then and there that the writing life was the one for me.

Isle of Ischia On a bright, windy June morning the church bells of this beautiful island rang out in welcome to the most egregious concourse of sailing boats to have arrived off its shores since Commodore Thomas Troubridge sailed into the bay of San Angelo in 1799. Troubridge, who under the command of Lord Nelson had been dispatched to quell an island revolt, had brought great distinction to the family, a distinction upheld by his family for 200 years until in a moment of madness ‘Poor Tom Troubridge’ was lured into marriage by the little known but highly ambitious daughter of an Australian librarian and an Austrian POW guard, Marie Christine Reibnitz, presently known as Princess Pushy and then some.

Frankfurt The worst part is the weigh-in. Hundreds of heavily muscled, cauliflower-eared, tattooed, menacing-looking, sweaty men — from Mongolia, Korea, Japan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Greece, Germany, Brazil, Canada, France, Hungary, the US, you name it — wait patiently and silently to step on the scales. Everyone holds his passport, which he is required to show once on the scales. It is a funny sort of scene. Naked men holding a passport. It could be out of the Gulag, as most fighters from eastern Europe have shaven heads and broad Slavic peasant faces. (The purpose of this is to stop ex-communist countries from sending in thinner men to pose as the heavies who later on do the fighting, a not unheard of custom by our friends the Russkies.

On board S/Y Bushido I am writing this under extreme torture. I have been vomiting for hours due to food poisoning, am totally dehydrated, but even one gulp of water brings on more violent up-chucks. ‘You’ll just have to wait it out,’ says a doctor over the telephone. Easier said than done. And to think I was worried about girls and other such bagatelles. Without health no woman is worth a nickel. I suppose I overdid things in London, and then in the south of France. London was fun, what with Asprey’s throwing a bash for me, and then my own thank-you dinner at Bellamy’s following. People like Fraser Nelson and Andrew Neil said such kind things, I felt embarrassed. Then St Tropez proved my undoing.