Lisa Hilton

Another day, another Berlusconi outrage. Writing on the “embarrassment” Silvio Berlusconi must have felt at having received the news of David Mills’s conviction for bribery whilst in conference with Nancy Pelosi, the British press have rather touchingly missed the point. The news is not that Mills has been found guilty, nor that due to Italy’s statute of limitations law he will be unlikely to serve a single day of his sentence, nor that Berlusconi’s government have exempted their leader from trial, nor yet that the “Alfano lodo” is likely to be further manipulated to prevent the judicial conclusion in the Mills case from being permitted as evidence in any future trial of the Italian premier, despite claims of its being unconstitutional.

Literary news this week suggests that when it comes to women writing about sex, reviewers are still reacting in the same way as Dr Johnson to his walking dog, surprised that it’s being done at all. So hats off to Charlotte Roche, who has managed to give both the Sunday Times and the Guardian the willies by cheerfully confessing to consuming pornography with her husband and starting her book Wetlands with a graphic discussion of hemorrhoids. Male reviewers seem barely to have moved on from the mentality of the Chatterley trial: anything which disturbs or shocks them must be dismissed as pornography.

Milan may be Italy’s richest city, but no-one this weekend was talking about the markets or “Il New Deal di Obama”. The only topic during the Engadine treasure hunt is who is going ‘up” this weekend.  “Up” means St Moritz, where from December until April, Milanese society is to be found every weekend munching apfelstrudel at Hanselman’s, hosting kitschy raclette parties in their houses at Zuoz or Celerina and possibly taking a run down the Trais Fluors or the Corvatsch.   Romans claim the more serious pedigrees, but what the Milanese miss on breeding they make up for in snottiness. Getting it wrong in St Moritz is horribly easy.

Many of us may no longer believe in God, but it appears we still miss Him. The nineteenth century’s anguished howl of loss as the tide of faith receded across the sands of Dover beach had diminished to barely a whimper before the atheist buses zoomed along to jolly up the argument. Catholic bishops in Genoa have succeeded in banning the Italian version of the campaign whilst bus driver Ron Heather has declared his intention to boycott any bus carrying the slogan “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life”. Perhaps Mr Heather is objecting to a certain lack of rigour in the statement; “probably” inclines to a more agnostic view, whilst as a predicate for relaxation the absence of God seems inane, if not vulgar.

I love the gym on a January morning. The frantic flush on the faces of the bankers as they Stairmaster to redundancy, the quivers of the anorexics staggering into their fifth mile. Actually, there aren’t any anorexics. The anorexics of Bloomsbury are clearly lacking in New Year’s resolve. Hardly surprising, as despite the tsunami of publicity annually devoted to the perils of eating disorders, only 19 out of 1,000,000 women are suffering from anorexia, according to Clinical Knowledge Summaries, as opposed to the 240,000 afflicted with obesity. Hardly an epidemic, yet anorexia is one of those curious points of intersection where the Guardian and the Daily Mail agree.

We know it’s not cool to dress like a master of the universe right now, and the lunchtime crowd at the Ivy on Tuesday were less Madoff than Man at C&A. Regulars have always been more fashionable than Fashion, considering themselves too serious and important to appear to pay attention to clothes, but the abundance of pastel jumpers suggests a trend reminiscent of Nineties black-nylon stealth wealth. Perhaps dressing like a contestant in a celebrity golf challenge indicates a cannily egalitarian sympathy with the miseries of middle management. Sartorial stress is creeping into other outposts of the Caring empire.

One of the best things about Paris is that it never changes. The stone is always the colour of Champagne, the cabbies are always foul and Bernard-Henri Levi is always seated on the first table opposite the door as you go into the Flore. I’ve spent most of my adult life in Paris, and perhaps the thing I loved about it most is that one could never be unhappy there. Wretched, heartbroken, tragic, but never merely sad. All that was necessary was a noisette  and a Marlboro Light and suddenly one was Juliette Greco or Simone de Beauvoir-deliciously, adolescently, maudlin. Yet now it smells wrong. Sunday was the first time I had been back since the smoking ban, and the cafes no longer smell of Gauloises and angst but of industrial air freshener and bitter despair.

Still few signs of retrenchment in Notting Hill, although at a Euro-bankers party this weekend one wit did propose that Soda-Streamed Chablis might pass as acceptably crunchy Champagne. How the time must fly in what’s left of the City. Over the canapés (chestnuts wrapped in lardo, salmon with liquorice), one guest described the distress she had felt at the appalling poverty which co-exists with the conspicuous trappings of new wealth on a recent business trip to Mumbai. Recent tragedy aside, the Western press seems reluctant to criticize this aspect of the Indian economic boom, preferring to relegate teeming misery to the status of energetic vibrancy or authentic local colour.