High life

Gstaad I wrote this last week, as we’re going to press early. It seems everyone who is anyone is staying up late on Sunday night in order to watch the Oscars, and cheer for the gay western which has been nominated for eight Academy Awards. I have not seen Brokebutt Mountain, but I hear that the film’s haunting musical score, ‘Homo on the Range’, is wonderful. But these are old, Fifties jokes, and beneath contempt. Mind you, not in Wyoming, where the author of Brokeback Mountain based her story. Wyoming is a wonderful place, where once upon a time my friend Professor Yohannes Goulandris was accosted by some ranchers who wished to know whether he was with them or against them. The good prof.

Ancona I am here on a pilgrimage, honouring the descendants of this greatest of Italian towns, men like Galileo, Michelangelo, Dante and, of course, Matthew d’Ancona, considered among those in the know the greatest Anconan of them all. Just kidding. I’m in Gstaad, and just did three runs before breakfast, because the plebs have arrived for the high season and the slopes are as crowded as the mosques in Tottenham during Ramadan. The trick is to wake up early, put on the boots, ski for about an hour, and then head for home. Easier said than done, needless to say. At my age the hangovers are terrible, but the mountain air does help. Mind you, what’s good about Gstaad is that very few people ski.

Gstaad I am personally in touch with British Muslim leaders and appealing to them to spare the life of my friend Claus von B.

To Harrow, the most heroic of public schools, for a speech about the press, probably among the least defensible of professions. I say the most heroic because Harrow lost 644 boys in the Great War, more than any other public school, I believe. One enters the building where I spoke about the unspeakable through a shrine, with a sarcophagus on the left and its surrounding walls carved with the names of those who fell on the field of honour. Passing through the shrine one enters a large space where a wreath of stone commemorates the dead of the second world war. Say what you will about the class system, public school boys did not exactly shirk their duty when their country called.

Rome They say that the invading Barbarians were so overwhelmed by the Pantheon’s beauty that they didn’t take it apart brick by brick. It is, of course, the most perfectly symmetrical monument, along with the Parthenon, to have survived since antiquity, the former lucky enough not to have been blown up à la latter. The Pantheon is a perfect space, the diameter of its rotunda exactly the same as its height, 142 feet. It sits in the middle of the bend in the Tiber that cradles Rome’s historical centre, halfway between the Vatican and Capitoline Hill, its low dome rising only slightly above the rooftops.

Gstaad On the evening that Charles Kennedy resigned, Barry and Lizzie Humphries came to dinner. My German cook Alexander made a special cake for Dame Edna, but Barry smelled a rat. He asked if the cake contained any alcohol. The answer was almost none at all. ‘Well,’ said the great man, who has not had a drink in 30 years, ‘if I ask for another ten helpings, we’ll know what’s in it.’ The idea that these Liberal creeps got rid of a man who had done a good job as leader of such a shitty party for having a drink too many is quite revolting. It’s almost as bad as Oscar Wilde being sent to prison for doing something 90 per cent of the upper classes used to do at school.

Liberal columnists, especially in London, New York and Los Angeles, can’t quite grasp why some Christians get upset about people saying ‘Happy Holidays’ instead of ‘Happy Christmas’. ‘People who use the word holiday now face angry Christian protests,’ they assert. Well, if they have faced such protests, it’s news to me. Most Christians I know simply snicker when the C-word is avoided in order not to cause offence. What reasonable people get upset about is being forbidden to say Happy Christmas themselves, or call a Christmas tree a Christmas tree. Actually, I don’t think I know of a single Christian who rubs his Christianity into non-Christians by wishing a Happy Christmas to a devout or non-devout Muslim or Hindu or Jew.

New York My last week in the Bagel and then back to good old London. And it’s just as well I’m still here, or some of Sunny Marlborough’s children might take a swipe at me. Last week I wrote about the old duke, correctly calling him Sunny, a diminutive which derives from Sunderland, one of his family handles. Somehow the ‘u’ turned into an ‘o’, as in Sonny Corleone, plus an ‘l’ went missing, which reminded me of the bad old days of 1977, when disgrundled printers massacred names on purpose. But not to worry. Thanks to Lady T. and the ghastly Murdoch the printers have gone the way of good manners, and last week was just an aberration.

New York A letter to the mother of my children from the greatest living French writer, Michel Déon, one of the 40 immortals of the French Academy, shows me to be a philistine. Michel kindly points out that Mozart’s Don Juan was inspired by a Molière play, not by a Beaumarchais one, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago while defending womanisers. I think I knew that, but I guess my mind was on Harold Pinter and the prize he got for writing unwatchable plays, and I scribbled the wrong name. Michel also writes that he doubts Marie-Laure de Noailles ever had a German lover because she was too ugly. This I find quite funny. Michel Déon obviously likes beautiful women, ergo he judges Prussian officers by his high Gallic standards.

New York I thought Catherine Meyer made the week’s most intelligent remark: ‘If Cabinet ministers can sell their memoirs, why can’t civil servants?’ Or words to that effect. She’s a good German, probably the old-fashioned kind, but the old-fashioned kind has been unpopular since the war, although never with me. Now she’s more unpopular than ever, I presume, her hubby having exposed those clowns passing themselves off as Her Majesty’s ministers. Jack Straw trembling in front of some hamburger-chewing American, and Prescott scratching his head about the Balklands. What a bunch of losers, oy veh! And speaking of losers, the bureaucrooks in Brussels want to introduce an emissions tax on flyers, as if flying wasn’t already very expensive.

New York When Jean-Marie Le Pen democratically won the right to challenge the incumbent Jacques Chirac for the presidency in 2002, I wrote in this here space that happiness was to wake up and find Le Pen president of France. By the reaction I had, you’d think I had prayed for Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot — I list them in order of the numbers they killed — to have landed the top job in the land of cheese. Three years later, the chickens are coming home to roost, as they say in Clermont Ferrand. Paris is burning, or rather French cars are burning, and the people that Le Pen warned against a long time ago are burning them. Sir Oswald Mosley and the great Enoch Powell must be enjoying the joke.

Unlike Peregrine Worsthorne, I thought the Duff Cooper diaries were interesting and terrific, and also made me envious as hell. Oh, to have lived back then. People sure had fun. I particularly liked the part where Duff puts down a certain party as boring because of the presence of spivs. Well, lucky old Duff. If he were around nowadays, he’d be writing about some sponsored event where among the spivs he might run into a gent of sorts. Of course, one could have fun back then, because the barbarians were still outside the gates. No journalists, no people in trade, no cheap celebrities, no It girls, no New Labour. One thing I have not understood is the complaint from some reviewers about Duff Cooper’s infidelities. He stayed married until the end, didn’t he?

Washington DC As far as catfights are concerned, this one cannot compare with, say, Bette Davis v. Joan Crawford, or even Crystal v. Alexis Carrington, but it will do for the rainy season. Maureen Dowd, a 55-year-old New York Times columnist known for her hysterical outbursts against George W. Bush, has taken an 800-word swipe against her Times colleague Judith Miller, fresh out of jail for refusing to reveal her so-called sources. This is the kind of fight where the fans root for a double knockout. It’s more Paris Hilton v. Nicole Ritchie, if you know what I mean. The more blood spilled, the better.

Rome Another bride, another groom, another sunny honeymoon, another season, another reason, for making whoopee... Like the song by Sammy Kahn, we made whoopee in Rome last weekend, the excuse being — yes, you guessed it — a wedding. Il Principe Boncompagni Ludovisi and his former wife Benedetta, born Barberini Colonna, married off their boy Bante to Delphina Lapham, daughter of two very old friends of mine, Lewis and Joan Lapham. Lou — as I call him because, although he’s posh, he has always fought for the underdog — was the star witness for the defence of the recent lawsuit by Roman Polanski against Vanity Fair. Which VF of course lost because it took place in the UK.

Venice I may have spoken too soon. Venice is also a good place for a party. The only trouble with Venezia is that anything one writes about the place has already been written. Even what I’ve just said has been said a thousand times. Original pronouncements about the Dresden of the south are rare; as rare, in fact, as men who have served their country among the slobs of New Labour. But let’s not be beastly to the barbarians. Or even think about them. Not here, in one of the most historic city-states of the Western world. After Greece and Rome went down the Swanee, it was the creativity of Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries that became the driving force of Western civilisation.

Madrid This is the sultriest city in Europe and, along with Paris and Rome, the most romantic capital of the old continent. When visiting Madrid there is only one place to stay, the Hotel Ritz, right in the heart of the city, opposite the Prado. There is a bucolic air about the Ritz, with the wide leafy streets that surround it and its beautiful garden-restaurants, which hint of romance and the forbidden pleasures of long ago. The past, of course, is what Spain is all about. Charles V had made it the most powerful country in Europe, imbuing his people with pride as well as melancholy, which his chronically depressed mother suffered from. Back then Spain was a closed country.

Gstaad I can’t remember exactly how long ago it was, sometime during the late Nineties, but I do remember that at the time I was sort of running a section of the New York Press called ‘Taki’s Top Drawer’. I say sort of because I’m not exactly a hands-on editor. In fact, I’m no hands at all, a writer’s dream, even if I say so myself. Then one day I read about how a Murdoch rag had entrapped Freddie Windsor in a cocaine scandal, and blew my stack. Windsor I don’t know, and his mother comes across as an egregious braggart and phony, but entrapping an 18-year-old just because he’s related to the royals I found to be worse than shooting a healthy horse, beneath contempt and all that.

Gstaad Back in the good old days, the common belief was that the climate was determined by a large number of gods, with Poseidon in specific charge of the weather at sea. Poseidon could be a hell of a shit at times, torturing poor sailors for years, starting with the wily Ithakan king, Odysseus. Still, people built temples in Poseidon’s name in order to appease him, some of which still stand, as in Sounion, east of Athens. I have often worshipped in Sounion, as the temple is the last civilised thing one sees while sailing to sinful islands like Mykonos. My prayers have always been the same. Please, pretty please, Poseidon, help me find a beautiful blonde German girl with big tits in Mykonos, one that also gives it away like a Frisbee... you get my drift, Posei old boy...

Gstaad I know few politicians and speak to even fewer — Lady Thatcher and Lord Tebbitt being the exceptions — so I’m hardly the one to judge whether being a cuckold is good for one’s political career or not. I am, of course, talking about Nicolas Sarkozy’s marital problems, and the fears expressed by the British press that his career might be in jeopardy as a result. That’s the Brit press for you. It simply does not understand the French, c’est tout. The great Napoleon was greatly cuckolded by Josephine and, after his fall, by Marie Louise, and it certainly didn’t stop the Bonaparte legend or adoration of his person by his subjects.

Gstaad Sartre famously called hell other people, and he had not even been on a boat anchored next to a gin palace during the month of August. Yachting in the Med used to be a cliché, as well as a very enjoyable pursuit. No longer. In Simi, one of the least known and prettiest of Greek islands off the Turkish coast, some friends of mine got a dose of what Sartre meant. A stink pot came into the tiny harbour and its captain was told it could not anchor next to my boat because the spot was reserved for the ferry. A large American woman emerged and using the f-word non-stop told the harbour master to get lost. Then the rather ugly gin palace, which looked like a charter, proceeded to dock where it had been told not to.