Taki

New York   It was 51 years ago, in the Hôtel du Cap d’Antibes, that I first met the man whose opioid product has, along with other prescription opioids, killed more than 200,000 Americans. Mortimer Sackler looked old even back then. He had a Noo Yawk accent and, even though we’d never been introduced, approached me after a tennis match I had just lost with some unsolicited advice: ‘You need to calm down. Take a tranquilizer’ — or words to that effect. (I had been feuding throughout the match over atrocious line calls with a French ref who was being intimidated by the pro-French crowd.) Although I do not gladly take advice from strangers, I thanked him nevertheless and told him that pills were not the answer but good refereeing was.

New York   This place feels funny, a bit like Beirut, where Christians, Jews, Muslims, Druze and encamped Palestinians live together but separately, with one or two million Syrian refugees completing the mix. Over here the once-ruling Wasps are now irrelevant, having moved to their country clubs in the suburbs. The Chinese are creeping up, having bought more real estate in Manhattan alone than Islamic State has lost in Syria and Iraq. (I now get nuisance telephone calls in Chinese.) On the bottom of the ladder are the Hispanics and the African-Americans, the former doing all the heavy lifting in the construction business, the latter, sadly, being the majority in city jails. The Koreans are more or less hunky-dory, working 25 hours per day and then some.

New York   Goodbye, snow-capped peaks; hello, swampy brown East River. So long, fresh alpine air; greetings to choking diesel fumes. Adios, cows and cuckoo clocks; welcome, filthy island packed to the gills with angry, mean, squat Trump haters who live in decrepit buildings they share with rats. Yes, I’m back in the city that never sleeps, and whose residents are perennially offended. That is the bad news. The good news is that the word Brexit means nothing over here — nada, as our Hispanic cousins say. Instead of the B-word we have the S-word, as in the college admissions scheme that turned into a scandal.

Gstaad   As Emperor Maximilian told his convulsed-by-tears servants as he was about to be executed by the Mexicans: ‘Who knew?’ Last week the owner of the Palace hotel in Gstaad rang me and asked me to join him for a drink with Akira Kitade, a Japanese author best known for Visas of Life and the Epic Journey about how the Jewish Sugihara survivors reached Japan and safety. Like most of his countrymen and women, Mr Kitade was extremely polite and shyly asked me to tell him all I knew about Nissim Segaloff, born between Bulgaria and Serbia before the turn of the last century and a survivor of the Titanic disaster in 1912, according to a High life column by yours truly in the issue of The Spectator dated 27 January 1979.

Gstaad   As everyone knows, the definition of serendipity is searching for a needle in a haystack, and instead finding a farmer’s daughter. Not so fast, as they say. I live among farmers and haystacks up here in the Alps, and I’ve yet to run into a farmer’s daughter who is worth the buckshot in the bottom. I was thinking of such matters all last week while skiing with my son and his two children. How happy I feel now, surrounded by wife and children and grandchildren — something I’ve avoided throughout my life while chasing daughters. Incidentally, the little turd Taki (just turned 13) is now so good a skier that the ‘race of the generations’ has been called off. He’s just too fast and I’m just too old and slow, so my son J.T.

A rare British species, a womanising ex-foreign secretary, kissed and told about his brief affair with a yellow-eyed temptress last week, and it brought back memories of a similar tryst on the part of yours truly. Boris Johnson reclined on a bed of straw with a purring cheetah and lived to write about it, although I am certain there were plenty of Brussels sprouts hoping for a different ending to the affair. Never mind. Boris and the cheetah met at Howletts, the John Aspinall Foundation-owned wild animal park in Kent, a place I used to know well. A bit of antebellum lore: if your name is carved on a commemorative column, enjoy it. I am told that mine is on one at Howletts, but perhaps that is hearsay, as I have not been there since the founder’s death back in the year 2000.

Gstaad   It’s party time here. From the richest billionaires down to those impoverished souls with only a few million to their name, the joint is jumpin’. Last week one tycoon converted his mega chalet into a nightclub and the music boomed away all night. Everyone who attended turned into Beethoven after one hour, which improved the situation in a way. People talk such rubbish nowadays that it was a relief to point at one’s ears and shake one’s head. I did not last long. I’ve been deaf ever since. My son came home at 5 a.m. Next week we’ve got an Italian countess’s blast from the past. I hope we’ll be doing the shimmy and the black bottom and the charleston, but I doubt it.

Gstaad   Who was it that said we always hurt those we love the most? I did just that last week, skiing out of control, making a sharp left turn and crashing into my wife Alexandra — a beautiful and terrific skier — who was standing still in front of a mogul. As I knocked her down, my skis ran over her face crushing her nose and causing two deep gashes on her forehead. I then rolled down the mountain unable to stop because of the ghastly plastic garments we now wear that accelerate our speed on the ground. Neither Alexandra nor I wear a helmet while skiing, something to reconsider if ever there is a next time.

Gstaad   Here in Gstaad there is no worker alienation. Nor are the rich especially worried. The talk is about snow conditions, upcoming parties, the price of real estate, Brexit and, of course, socialism, a disease that strikes those far away from this Alpine resort, but has yet to infect any of the locals. I had a long chat with a friend of mine, born and bred up here, who makes his living teaching people how to ski and fixing their television sets after hours. ‘Don’t you ever mind when you see first hand how plush the new chalets are, especially of those like myself who made it the old-fashioned way, by inheriting it?’ Not a bit, was the answer, ‘Life’s like a casino, some win and some lose.

‘The British political class has offered to the world an astounding spectacle of mendacious, intellectually limited hustlers.’ This is a direct quote from a recent New York Times, a newspaper that is known for being anti-heterosexual white male, anti-Christian, and now anti-British ruling class. Mind you, normally when someone attacks the British I smile. And more often than not I mumble that no one hits the Brits harder than themselves. This time, however, let’s take a second look as to why the venom. Under the headline ‘The Malign Incompetence of the British Ruling Class’, some clown I’ve never heard of takes up half a broadsheet page denouncing Britain’s past in general and that of the ruling class in particular.

Asked how he was feeling as he was about to give a speech to a ladies group, Mark Twain, looking stricken, is supposed to have said: ‘How do you expect me to feel? Shakespeare is dead, Goethe is dead, and I have a terrible cold.’Alas, I’m no Twain, but I feel worse than the Mississippi sage ever did — that I’m sure of. Going cross-country skiing underdressed in bone-chilling temperatures didn’t help. I now sneeze about 150 times a day, I’m aching all over, my nose is running as if I had shoved two ounces of Peruvian pure up it, and my head feels as though it is stuffed with poisoned marshmallows. So, last Sunday, unable to read, I decided to improve my mind by watching television, the invention that has made western man a superior human being.

Gstaad   Do any of you know what cisgender is? I just found out. Cisgender is a term that describes someone whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth. Amazing, isn’t it, that we now need a pleonasm for saying that someone’s a man or a woman? I sometimes envy my low life colleague Jeremy when I read about his conversations with normal people while living inside a French cave. I can no longer converse with anyone who is ‘with it’ — you know the type, the ones who think you’re a Paleolithic hunter gatherer if you say you’re hungry, what with there being so many famine victims in Africa.

Gstaad The funny thing is that I was at school with a man called Ted Widmer, and I recently read that one Ted Widmer is a ‘distinguished lecturer’ at a New York university and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. The Ted I knew was anything but ethical and dressed rather strangely. Never mind. Whether or not he was a schoolmate, Widmer has written a treatise on the year 1919 and called it ‘1919: the Year of the Crack-up’. It’s very good. Basically, he says that what took place in 1919 shaped the world for the rest of the century. One hundred years later, his crack-up looks to me like a tiny fissure — a chink —yet in a funny way it did shape the rest of the century.

Gstaad My annual end-of-year party in the Bagel was a bust. Too many people brought their friends and I ended up asking men and women to please leave both my bedroom and, especially, my bathroom. I had some very pretty young things drop in. Some even overstayed and — surprise, surprise — there were some items missing after the clean-up the next day. But that was then. I’m now in Gstaad for the duration. The good news for the nouveaux is that it rained like hell for three days, washing away all the snow. Skiing and new moolah don’t mix. Main Street now sounds a bit like Beirut — or should that be Athens? However it sounds, it’s not like the Helvetia of the good old days.

Here we are, 41 years down the road, and I’m once again writing for The Spectator’s Christmas issue. This is a triple one, so I want to make it count. In my sporting days, trying too hard was as counterproductive as not trying hard enough, so let’s see if this principle also applies to the written word. Eighty-five thousand Yemeni children may have died of hunger, and 10,000 men, women and children have been killed, most of them by indiscriminate and disproportionate air strikes targeting civilians, and that murderous megalomaniac Mohammed bin Salman and his Gulf allies are responsible. Just think of the enormity of the crime: 85,000 under-fives starved to death in the cruellest way possible by those overfed criminals in Riyadh. Then picture George W.

New York At times I used to think the place was real. The New York of films, that is. The reality is an urban agglomeration of millions, most of whom have a disinclination to speak English. Then there’s the celluloid city of 42nd Street, Annie Hall, Dead End, Rear Window and King Kong. This is the dream city I keep writing about, the one that stabs you in the gut because it’s gone. And it gets worse when you accept that it never existed in the first place. Like the woman of your dreams who has lost her looks and your best friend tells you they were never there. And yet they must have been, because I lived them.

This makes Brexit take a back seat: hints of ancient life have appeared on Mars. Carbon building blocks and other signs of past microbes are thought to lie in Jezero, a 28-mile-wide crater just north of Mars’s equator. The crater was once filled with a lake that was 800ft deep. Just imagine the sailing that went on among upper-class Martians 3.5 billion years ago. It was warmer back then — up there, that is — and that lake, I am certain, was where the elite met to eat and swim. And sail. We humans have been evolving for some time now, but not really. Only a few decades ago we were certain that the oldest human fossil was a small-brained female by the name of Lucy. Lucy was known as Australopithecus afarensis, and she existed between 3.85 and 2.95 million years ago.

New York   If I wrote this in one of those newspaper diaries about metropolitan life, no one would believe it. But I trust that The Spectator’s readership has faith in me, so here goes. Last week six inches of snow were suddenly dumped on the Bagel in the space of two hours, bringing the city to a total halt. Trains stopped running, planes stopped flying, cars stopped driving. The traffic cops — very short in stature and Spanish-speaking to a man and woman, and appointed to the job in order to keep them off the welfare rolls — gave up and allowed drivers to go through red lights, which turned an already bad traffic situation into complete gridlock.

New York A little Austrian count was born to my daughter last week in Salzburg, early in the morning of 9 November, becoming my third grandchild. Through modern technology, I was flooded with pictures of a blond, fuzzed and pink baby boy less than a day old. The mother of my children, who was flying in from Gstaad, did not make it on time, which was just as well. Like most women, she tends to overreact where babies are concerned. Unlike us tough guys, who tend to hit the bottle and celebrate instead. And speaking of the fair sex, Lionel Shriver is some columnist, the best American writer by far, and she has sure got the #MeToo phonies down to a tee. We’re lucky to have her.

New York   An old-fashioned party is a gathering of friends invited by the host or hostess, who foots the bill. Old-fashioned parties are very rare in New York nowadays. Actually, they are non-existent, having been replaced by the charity shindig: the guests pay, the host or hostess profits, the gossip columns get to write about it, and the charity sometimes even gets to see some of the moolah the climbers paid to get in. Last week I went to an old-fashioned party given by Prince Pavlos of Greece and his princess, M-C. The occasion was the princess’s sister Pia Getty’s birthday. I ran into a lot of old friends I hadn’t seen in years, and sat at a table with four ladies, some of whom I pursued when my hair was still salt and pepper.