Taki

He was a member of a charmed circle of Hellene and Philhellene intellectuals just before and after the second world war, experiencing modern Greece and seeing it as a place rich in beauty and a stimulus to artistic creation. Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose biography by Artemis Cooper I just put away almost in tears — like a magical night with the girl of one’s dreams, I didn’t want it to end, but end it did — was a second Byron in Greek eyes. I found the book unputdownable, as they say in Boise, Idaho, especially the rich descriptions of rambunctious jaunts to tavernas and places I had spent my youth in.

To Manchester for an address to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society for the Kilburn Lecture on ‘The Future of the Olympic Games’. The learned society is Britain’s second oldest, after the Royal Society, having been instituted in 1781. John Dalton, the father of modern chemistry, was one of its important past members. My NBF Peter Barnes (I had to explain to him that the acronym meant new best friend) picked me up at the airport and whisked me to Manchester Metropolitan University, and within 45 minutes I had changed into evening clothes and was facing a jolly gathering of bearded professors, smiling ladies and an all-round appreciative audience who laughed at my jokes and were extremely generous with their applause.

Philosophy has been known to be a bit of a struggle for many of us, except, of course, if we happen to be professional footballers, pop stars, film actors, reality TV performers or hedge-fund managers. Although in last week’s Spectator Quentin Letts offered a primer on how to pretend to be an Egypt expert, the poor little Greek boy, always ready to offer more to the sacrosanct Spectator readership than an Englishman, will now take you to the wilder reaches of philosophy as applied to real life. One of the reasons I always write about the past is ‘anamnesis,’ which is the exact opposite of amnesia, the latter a condition suffered by every single one of the world’s dictators and then some.

Gstaad Having spent a great part of my life charting the decline of civilisation, I am not at all surprised at the goings-on in Tunisia, especially as I never considered the place to be civilised. How apt that the arch crook dictator Ben Ali (Baba) slithered away to Saudi Arabia, itself a beacon of democracy and human rights — especially for women — instead of embarrassing my little community of Saanen and landing here in good old Helvetia. Mind you, Saanen airport can only take very small jets, something a crook like Ben Ali Baba would never deign to escape in. But it’s nice that crooks and dictators help each other. Imagine if Robert Mugabe had not taken in that arch Ethiopian murderer Mengistu. He’d probably be living in a place like Athens or even Rome.

Gstaad Back in 1975 Adam Fergusson, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, published a very important book with a very apt modern title, When Money Dies. It was about the nightmare of Weimar hyperinflation, something our so-called leaders might well think about, which of course they will not. We are so dumbed-down by reality and talent shows on the idiot box, why bother to bring up unpleasant subjects? Only recently I read somewhere that the obnoxious John Prescott defended the war criminal Tony Blair and his party’s record, which in a way is not unlike arms manufacturers being praised by Greens for population control. People are simply too dumb, too cowed, or too interested in celebrity goings-on to care about what a slob like Prescott bloviates about.

Six hours into the new year and already there was trouble. My own bash to welcome 2011 with 50 of my nearest finished around 5 a.m., so I rolled down towards the Palace hotel still looking for some action. I had a very pretty German girl in tow, Fiona, a friend of my son, so I swept into the lobby in style. Then it happened. I saw the vision to end all visions and a desperate, sensuous pain — the type that can make a grown man cry out — hit me as never before. This is the curse upon those who follow the supreme Beauty — that is to say, the Beauty that belongs not to ideas and ideals but to living forms. Beauty, they say, is in the eye of the beholder, but I say that’s all crap. Real beauty is rare and extremely precious.

My son J.T. managed to seriously shorten my life by inviting close to 75 young people to my house for an end-of-the-year party, among whom I found some seriously beautiful girls who were out way past their bedtime. My routine for my children’s bashes is a simple one. I train hard either in judo or karate, work up a very good sweat, shower, shave, put on my finest Anderson & Sheppard suit, go to the drawing room where the main battle is about to take place, and start downing vodka and cranberry juice. I never touch food, as it produces a hangover the next day. After about one hour and around five drinks, I am feeling no pain but am completely lucid. Then the scrum begins.

This is in praise of younger men. An outrage is about to take place at Preston Crown Court, where on 7 January 2011, a beautiful 27-year-old ballet teacher, Sarah Pirie, will be sentenced for ‘abducting a 15-year-old’, who was not named (unlucky chappie) for obvious reasons. In my not so humble opinion, this is dead wrong. And if the ballet teacher is sent to prison, it will be the cruellest decision since the Athenians sent poor old Socrates down for corrupting the young. Mind you, the Brits have always been undersexed, underfinanced and, most of the time, under the table with drink, but this is ridiculous. Because is there a greater gift a 27-year-old beauty can bestow on a 15-year-old boy than sex? Not the other way round, mind you.

The irony is such that the word itself loses meaning. The ultimate Afghan conman, an oxymoron if ever there was one, is someone Hollywood couldn’t make up. A catch-him-if-you-can type of script wouldn’t make it past the first rewrite. Even ‘based on a true story’ wouldn’t help. If it weren’t for the dead and maimed for life, I’d be laughing my pants off. Just as funny was the timing, at least from my point of view. I’d gone up to Connecticut to spend the weekend with Graydon and Anna Carter, he being the supremo of Vanity Fair. Once there, I was given a Robert Harris book, Selling Hitler, about the conman who convinced everyone but David Irving that the Hitler private diaries were for real.

This is a good time to be in the Bagel. Walking briskly under changing autumn skies amid colours that still carry their summer clothes is an inspiring experience. Heaven knows I need it. Early morning means judo training — hangover or not — and on foggy days I walk through the park as if in a trance longing to reach the dojo before I’m enveloped by the yellow mist. After training, it’s as if a heavy load had been lifted from my shoulders. Literally. The heavy-duty training I’m putting in now will pay dividends next year. That’s how it goes, judo-wise, karate-wise, tennis-wise, sport-wise. It’s like nature: one has to plant in order to reap, unlike fellow Greeks, who reaped long before thinking of planting.

It’s open season against whites over here. A couple of weeks ago, an 18-year-old freshman at Rutgers University jumped off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate, also 18, and a female student accomplice used a webcam to film him surreptitiously in a gay sexual encounter and send it to their closest thousand friends. Tyler Clementi’s body was fished out a week later, after the cheap laughs had subsided. Clementi was a top violinist and was studying music. He came from a closely knit family, which is obviously devastated. The story made the news but the perpetrators were not treated as the monsters they are because — yes, you guessed it — Clementi was white and Catholic, while his roommate, Dharun Ravi, was from the subcontinent and quite brown.

My first copy of The Great Gatsby cost me $2. It was the year 1953, the cover was dark blue with city lights in the background, and a pair of mournful green eyes looking at nothing in particular. I had just finished Tender Is the Night, so I took Gatsby home in exhilaration, not unlike going home with the girl of your dreams — well, almost. I was not to be disappointed. Although I never related to Gatsby the way I did to Dick Diver — Jay reminded me of a couple of men I had met in my 15 years of life, whereas Dick was someone tragic whom I aspired to — it was the most glamorous of novels. It was lyrical as well as brutal, and like all Scott’s novels magical, mystical and full of romance.

Some of our readers may be aware that the sainted editor’s wife is Swedish — and she has a sister — but I swear on the Koran that what follows has nothing to do with that. The sainted one wrote about Sweden in these here pages two weeks ago. About how the Swedes have bucked the recession by lowering taxes. What I will tell you is about the fun I’ve had with the hyperborean beauties of that country, starting with my first great love Kerin, wife of a great tennis player of the late Fifties. We were touring together and as he would compete all week and I’d be out of the tournament by Tuesday or Wednesday, Kerin and I would spend a lot of time together. So much so that people talked.