Taki

Gstaad The staff are back and all is well, as they used to say long ago in faraway places. The gardener and the cleaner are Portuguese, and they greet me, with their inherent dignity, from afar. The Filipina maid and cook almost gets me in a headlock trying to thank me for keeping her on salary while she rested at home. I shoo her away. Who does she take me for, a lowlife cheapskate like Philip Green? I didn’t hesitate to send them all home. Mind you, I’ve taken such a shellacking on the stock market that I’ll soon be applying for a job myself, perhaps as an ageing gigolo to some fat old tart from Marienbad. I tango well and can waltz, so all I need to do is grow a pencil-thin moustache. But I’ll start with the bad news.

Gstaad Hippocrates is known as the father of Western medicine and he discovered and named a disease known as ‘micropoulaki’ during the Periclean period, in around 430 BC. He did not call it a virus, but a sickness of the brain. Some years later, Aristotle described micropoulaki syndrome as a disease but one that was not contagious, ‘no more than a fool can influence an intelligent fellow to act foolish’. Micropoulaki in classical Greek translates as having a tiny willy. Women should, by definition, be immune from the disease. But they are, strange as it may seem, known to suffer from it, although not as often and as badly as men do.

Gstaad Let me begin with a salute to the winner of this year’s Sir Jimmy Goldsmith prize: Professor Neil Ferguson. The prize is awarded every year to a man who casts convention aside and — lockdown or no lockdown — continues to shag his mistress and to hell with the coronavirus. The professor has apologised but Antonia Staats, the mistress, has not. Neither of them has anything to feel sorry about. When the urge comes, social distancing grows smaller, pardon the reverse pun. We all want to flatten the curve, and Ferguson did just that. He has proved by his rash action that sex conquers all, following in the tradition of England’s greatest hero, Horatio Nelson, and countless others, unsung heroes all.

Gstaad When indolence becomes intolerable, remembrances of things past become a lifesaver. Charles Moore’s Spectator Notes also helps. His recent item about his friend Lady Penn reminded me of events long ago that had slipped my mind because at the time I was under the influence and without sleep. About 20 years ago, the designer Carolina Herrera rang to invite me to a dinner in New York for Prue Penn, who was staying with her and her husband. When I was introduced to Lady Penn, she laughingly told me that we had met before, ten years earlier, ‘when you tried to pick me up at ten in the morning in a petrol station on the M4’.

As Cole Porter might have said, only second-rate people go on and on about their inner lives. Self-analysis, according to Cole, is the twin of self-promotion. Yet in this 10,000th issue of the world’s oldest and best weekly, and in my 43rd year of writing High Life, I have to admit to a bit of both of the above. So before any of you retreat into laptops and mobiles, some nostalgia is called for, starting in the spring of 1977. Many of the writers back then sent in their longhand-written copy via messenger, paid for by The Spectator. I used to type mine and slip it under the door at Doughty Street before heading for Berkeley Square and Aspinall’s.

Gstaad So the days — and months — drift by. This once peaceful Alpine town is packed with rich refugees fleeing the you-know-what. They come from nearby cities crammed with real migrants. There isn’t an empty apartment left, and the locals are raking it in. Two good friends have died, the village is supposed to be locked down, but God awful bikers are everywhere. Yes, they are biking down the middle of narrow paths which makes it impossible to keep your distance from them. What boggles the mind is the mentality of the morons who refuse to practise social distancing. The hotels, clubs and restaurants are shut, so surely they must be aware that there’s a virus making the rounds. But they persist in brushing past one as if it’s touchy-feely season.

Look at it this way: we’re all doing Desert Island Discs nowadays, and unless you’ve got the bug, it’s a damn good thing, too. I did the desert island bit around 30 years ago, when Sue Lawley was the presenter, and we got along fine, even after I commented on air that she had nice legs. I suspect it would have been a different story today, but another good thing about the virus is that it has knocked #MeToo off the front pages. For good, I hope, but I doubt it. Among my desert island picks was a version of ‘Lili Marlene’ sung by an army choir that I first heard as a four-year-old in an Athens street sung by a group of marching German soldiers.

Desperately boring times but very healthy ones. No parties, no girls, not too much boozing, lots of smoking and reading very late into the night. And non-stop training and sport. What else can one do when locked in with one’s wife and one’s son and with nostalgic thoughts of a time when people gathered in groups? It seems very long ago but do any of you remember when people gave parties? Desperate times demand desperate measures and make for desperate columnists. Meditation might be good for philosophers and their ilk, but correspondents need to get out and get the story.

No use datelining any more, I’m here for the duration. Even the ski lifts have been ordered to close: chiuso, geschlossen, fermé. The only way to ski now is the old-fashioned way, à la Hemingway: climb up with skins, peel them off, and enjoy the one and only run of the day. Not only is the climbing beneficial to one’s health, it’s also the only thing that’s free in good old Helvetia. Mind you, if too many people do it the Swiss will start charging for it. But for the moment, no one’s doing it as the snow has gone the way of women and children first in a sinking Saudi ship. This is also enforced family time. The mother of my children and my son are feeling a tiny bit paranoid, and seeing virus spreaders everywhere.

Gstaad     Rumours about the virus are flying around this village. First there was talk of a hotel being temporarily quarantined, then a shindig given by a fat social climber where one of the guests was said to be infected. So far these seem to have been false alarms but still the fat old rich who don’t ski are panicking, staying indoors and incommunicado. This is good news. Even better news is that I’ve been skiing with my son and have never had a better time, although he did have to wait for me at times. The snow was unexpectedly good and there was plenty of it. My trouble is that I look down from a south-facing verandah and see green fields.

Gstaad   I shoulda been a weatherman: no sooner had I announced snow to be a Gstaad rarity than it came down non-stop. But then it rained, so everything’s hunky-dory. Older rich people who don’t ski are relieved that it’s stopped; younger types who do indulge are over the moon that it’s snowed at all. Happy, happy Gstaad… but not really; the coronavirus news has some scared out of their wits. In fact, this alpine village is beginning to feel like Der Tod in Venedig, or Death in Venice for non-German speakers. The great South African doubles specialist Frew McMillan, now the best tennis commentator on TV, used to call me Dirk, as in Bogarde, because he thought I looked a bit like the thespian.

Gstaad It feels like a sepia-tinged melodrama, one directed by the great schlock master Sam Wood. Driving along the winding valleys through 17th-century villages, Gruyères Castle on one’s right, the heartbeat would quicken as Gstaad beckoned in the distance. Gstaad in those days meant beautiful women, parties galore, challenging, snow-covered slopes to swish down, and a friendly atmosphere. Only the lucky few knew about the place. All that has gone down the drain, except for the prices, which have gone through the roof. It’s called progress. I used to be able to identify the mood of a time, especially here in Gstaad, but no longer. For starters, there is no more snow from upstairs, only the man-made white stuff.

Gstaad I was not aware that there is a group of Spectator fans who meet in French-speaking Switzerland. They contacted me and we have agreed to meet up this week here in Gstaad. A very nice English voice informed me over the telephone of the existence of the group, asked if I was interested in speaking to it, and told me how long they have all been reading the dear old Speccie. My response was a resounding yes, and then I asked Michael Watts, the gentleman who rang me, if he was aware of my speaking fee. He was not. ‘Fifty thousand Swiss francs for 30 minutes,’ I told him and waited for the thud. But he agreed without a counter offer and asked if I needed a down payment. (Actually, a lunch is what we settled on, but don’t let my non-existent agent hear about it.

Gstaad Lenin Moreno is in trouble, despite his very unchristian first name. For any of you unfamiliar with the name, Senor Moreno is the president of Ecuador, a tiny South American country that I like very much because if you’ve met one Ecuadorian man you’ve met them all. There are 16 million Ecuadorians, and eight million of them, the men, all look like identical twins. One of my closest friends on the tennis circuit back in the late 1950s and early 1960s was Eduardo Zuleta, an Ecuadorian who was the colour of copper and could run all day, all night, 48 hours straight, as long as he was chasing a tennis ball.

I find myself detached from mainstream culture. It started with the demise of nightclubs like Annabel’s and the arrival of the people who frequent them nowadays, the likes of Lil Nas X, Dua Lipa, Lizzo, Fat Joe, Pusha T, DaBaby. All real names, incidentally, lifted from the saccharine, slush-like descriptions by gossip columnists of nightclubbing celebrities. Yep, things sure ain’t what they used to be — after dark, that is. Forget top hats and tails, and older men leering at figure-eight gels dressed in clingy gowns. This is the #MeToo era and men are almost redundant. The blatant extravagance — and at times arrogance — that came with inherited money is over. Silly empty-headed dowagers are a thing of the past.

I was walking up St James’s and happy to be in London. For a change I was not rushing but strolling in a leisurely manner, on time for lunch with Charles Moore at his club, when the lack of deference of certain Americans hit me like the proverbial pie in the face: ‘I mean, like, who the fuck does she think she is? I’m not taking this crap from anyone. This is my life and this is me…’ The young woman bellowing at the top of her screechy voice had those ubiquitous wires hanging from her ears, was wearing leggings — she was not bad-looking, incidentally — and was as unaware of her surroundings, as she shouted into her contraption, as it is possible to be.

Did any of you know that most of the 20th-century monsters — Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Ceausescu, Duvalier, and even the Ethiopian mini-Napoleon Mengistu — were rather good writers who could form better than average sentences that said that power grows out of the barrel of a gun? I read this in a Big Bagel weekly that was once known for its wit, but is now so blinded by hatred for the Donald that it has turned into a rag, surpassed in venom only by the New York Times and CNN. I knew that Mussolini was a scribbler of note because he wrote the editorials of his newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia before he took power. ‘Inequality and discipline, these are the substitutes for the cries of Equality and Liberty,’ wrote Il Duce.