Taki

If any more proof were needed that Brexit is the best thing to happen to Britain since 1066 and all that, here it is: geologists have at last assembled a picture of the forces that tore a ten-million-year-old land bridge away and turned Britain into an island rather than a peninsula of Europe such as Denmark and Scandinavia. Yippee! It was God himself who ordered it. The bridge ran from Dover to Calais and deep into Cheeseland, until the Almighty decreed Brexit. All this may have taken place a very long time ago, 450,000 years or so, but it’s proof that God never wanted Britain to be part of Europe. End of story, you atheist, tantrum-throwing dilettantes; you preening, foul-smelling youths; you uninformed, lefty, combed-over BBC caricatures of real people.

Things that I once loved — Fifth Avenue & 57th Street, brownstone terraces on hot summer afternoons, cold beer and fried eggs at 5 a.m. after a night of carousing, the Sherry-Netherland — and now miss have grown ever more monumental upon reflection. I suppose that it’s normal to miss things you loved when young, yet I still can’t get over how the people have changed — for the worse, needless to say. The city is at its best very early in the morning, the asphalt glistening after the rain or the water trucks that occasionally wash the avenues, the streets empty and still as a movie set. In the old days, on muggy nights, people used to sleep on the fire escapes in their underwear.

New York   I’d gladly exchange waistlines with him if he’d teach me to cut a phrase the way he does, in print that is. I’m talking about none other than our own ‘Brute’ Anderson, whose style of writing I particularly admire but find impossible to emulate. But I have an excuse; English was my third language, acquired age 12, after Greek and German. Never mind. A couple of weeks ago the ‘Brute’ mentioned Pamela Harriman in his column, a woman I know quite a lot about. He referred to her as the ‘naughtiest girl of the 20th century’, and one few husbands could resist.

 Gstaad It’s my last week in the Alps, and the snow is gone, replaced by brilliant sunshine. Silence reigns, broken only by the occasional clear, sharp wind. The town is now empty and clean, and the air bracing. I love the village out of season, when the shoppers have finally gone and the locals are preparing to release the cows into the mountains. Training at altitude will make it easy to go at it hard once I am back in the city — at least for a week or two. There is nothing like a three-month Alpine break for the old ticker. Dinner parties out of season are very gay affairs between old friends. Vivien Duffield gave one last week that could have been written by a Hollywood scriptwriter.

A cloudless sky, crunchy spring snow, longer, warmer days. I’ve finally got in some good skiing, twisting around moguls like an arthritic champ. It’s all in the mind, as my old wrestling coach used to tell me. If you think the other guy’s better, you’re bound to lose to him. The same goes for the slope. If it scares you, stay in the club and have another drink. Otherwise, attack it with gusto and feel like a champ again. The same applies to the fairer sex. If you’re too nervous to speak to her, keep moving. We have four of the prettiest young women at The Spectator, all taken alas, and I’ve managed not to make a fool of myself with any of them (well, a tiny bit with one of them, but what the hell, no one’s perfect).

At a chic dinner party last week, a friendly chow as big and black as a dog can be without being a bear sniffed a lady’s bum during pre-dinner drinks. I happened to be standing behind the lady and she raised her hand in anger. ‘It was Bessie the dog,’ I stammered. ‘What is wrong with you? I don’t do this no more.’ The lady in question is of a certain age, and the last one at the party I’d have goosed, but such are the joys of a bad reputation. Oh yes, before I forget, Marina, Princess of Savoy, who one month ago accused me of having locked her up for two days on board my boat, has now recanted, and admits that it was another awful Greek ship owner who did the dastardly deed.

A lousy fortnight if ever there was one. Two great friends, Lord Belhaven and Stenton and Aleko Goulandris, had their 90th birthday celebrations, and I missed both shindigs because of this damn bug. Lord Belhaven’s was in London, at the Polish Club, but flying there was verboten. Robin Belhaven is an old Etonian, served as an officer in Northern Ireland, farmed in Scotland, and has four children, eight grandchildren and one great-grandchild. He spent 35 years in the House of Lords when that institution was a responsible arm of the government and not a cesspool full of smarmy lawyers.

Gstaad Back in the good old days a funicular used to take skiers up, bucking all the way and stopping from time to time when the snowdrifts across the track got too deep. We used to wax our skis at every opportunity, deposit them in the baggage car, and ride the outdoor car. Most of us had a flask with good stuff in it, and once on top we’d push our laced-up boots into the toe irons and clamp them shut. We’d then wrap the long leather straps of the skis tightly around the boot, and presto, we’d be ready to ski. Skiing back then was an adventure, not just something to say you’d done. You had to put on lots of pullovers to ward off the cold, and top them off with a bulky ski jacket.

From my chalet high up above the village, I look up at the immense, glistening mountain range of the Alps, and my spirit soars. Even youthful memories receding into sepia cannot bring me down from the high. Mountains, more than seas, can be exhilarating for the soul. Then I open the newspapers and the downer is as swift as the onset of an Alpine blizzard. Television is even more of a bummer.

Gstaad One’s unpopularity on account of calling it a night diminishes in direct proportion to the severity of the next morning’s hangover. I was literally booed by Geoffrey Moore and co. for asking the wife of a friend to drive me 200 yards to my chalet. Co., not Geoffrey, had other plans for the lady, and I will give you, the readers, two guesses what those plans were. It was 5.30 a.m., the friend’s wife did look awfully charming — desirable is closer to the truth — and co. was getting touchy-feely, so I opened my big mouth and asked her to drive me home. The next day, all sorts of people thanked me rather profusely for ending the party. Starting with her hubbie, who was home babysitting. (Fool.

When I was young my recurring nightmare was that I would die and be reincarnated as a polo pony. I squeezed in lots of polo during the years I played, at least three matches per week, mostly in Paris, and I felt that polo ponies had the kind of deal the mass media are now handing Trump. I wasn’t mad about the people I played with either. Back then, in the Sixties and Seventies, fat businessmen who cantered hired good Argentines to carry the can, but picked up the cup after strolling around the field and yelling quite a lot. Well, now I’m over it, but have an even worse nightmare: that I might return as Trump’s White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, and have to face the outraged and hysterical so-called press corps every day.

When I saw an email from Lucy, the lady who has the unenviable task of editing my copy each week, I knew something was wrong. And sure enough it was. The bad news was that my first editor at my beloved Spectator had died. Forty years, gone in a jiffy. It was back in 1977, and I had gone to Turin to pick up a new car on my way to Paris. Back then one had to drive the first thousand miles slowly, while breaking in the engine. (Yes, I know: a bit like wearing spats and a monocle, but that’s how it was in those prehistoric days.) Driving a fast car slowly is like lying next to a beautiful girl but not being allowed to touch her: very frustrating. So to pass the time I thought up a story and memorised every word; it took about eight hours. I then typed it up and flew to London.

 Gstaad The snows came tumbling down just as the camel-drivers headed back to the Gulf. In fact, they never saw the white outdoor stuff. And a good thing it was, too. The outdoor stuff makes everything look so pretty that the glitzy types might have been tempted to return. God forbid. Let them stick to the indoor white stuff. The problem with Gstaad is the local council. They remind me of the EU: they’re intransigent, short-sighted and stick to a losing game. In Brussels they keep passing more and more laws and regulations. In Gstaad, they keep putting up their prices and building more and more apartments. As a gentleman with a close association to The Spectator told me, ‘My son doesn’t come here because there are no young women around.

 Athens I can only ask sardonically: was it worth it? Executed after unspeakable torture without giving anything away — and for what? Fat, avaricious and very rich Davos Man? Or those ignorant, self-indulgent, cowardly little twerps who demand ‘safe spaces in universities’? Was it worth dying for the crooks of Brussels and the Angela Merkels of this world? Poor, heroic and stoic Kostas Perrikos, whose statue stands on Gladstone Street in Athens, died a hero, and for what? Let’s begin with heroes. They are very different from peacocks. They don’t strut or take selfies, and they are mostly sotto voce. They don’t create whirlwinds and are a PR huckster’s nightmare.

There are Dames and there are dames. Dame Vivien, an old friend, became one for her philanthropy. Dame Edna, the creation of yet another friend, was given a damehood for her middle-class morality and upper-class pretensions. And now we have Dame Anna of Vogue, honoured for affecting a faux-aristocratic grandeur to the peasants of the fashion world. There is only one thing to say, and that’s ‘Gimme a break.’ The last of the Dambusters crew members is refused a knighthood, Nigel Farage ditto, yet a flatulent embarrassment like Victoria Beckham is rewarded for preening and sneering. As the mayor of Hiroshima was said to have asked on that awful August day in 1945, ‘What the fuck was that?

Gstaad  New Year’s Eve was a Rhapsody in Blue, with a clarinet glissando that promised joys to come, and the Gershwin downbeat not registering until 6 a.m. The hangover was, of course, Karamazovian, but who the hell cares. I am finally solid again, and even the flu I caught on the trip over is on its last legs, lingering and as annoying as EU regulations, but no longer to be taken seriously. I had lots of close friends for dinner, but the new chalet was packed by the time I began slurring. Mind you, it’s during dreamlike moments such as those between midnight and dawn that wisdom strikes: there is something very wrong with people’s values around these parts.

What a great year this has been, what a good mood I’m in, why, it’s almost like being in love. The year 2016 will be seen as the worst ever by many patients of Dr Klinghoffer, the famous German psychiatrist who treats those suffering from the extreme distress of post-electoral disappointment syndrome, and a man about to make a fortune treating the poor dears. There are many Brits under the Herr Doktor’s care, and his clinic, situated near Ossining, New York, resembled a British retreat for broken-down thespians following 23 June of this annus mirabilis. Now more American voices have been added, and when I last spoke to Dr Klinghoffer his heavy German accent sounded almost Hollywoodian: ‘Zese people are worse than ze English, zey cry at ze sight of an appleshdrudel.

I believe it was Christmas 1971, and I was up in Phu Bai, north of Danang, south of Hue. It was a miserable time, I was lonely and my career as a journalist was going nowhere. There wasn’t even any fighting going on to keep one’s mind occupied. On Christmas Eve I went to a Catholic church and was the only round-eyed man there. I prayed rather hard and after that, as by miracle, all my prayers were answered. I became a roving correspondent for an American weekly and have never looked back.

Here we go again, my 40th Christmas column in a row, and it seems only two weeks ago that I filed the last one. This is a very happy time of year — parties galore, lots of love for our fellow man and happiness all around. Mind you, there is an old calypso that says: ‘If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, never make a pretty woman your wife...’. I’m not so sure about that; in my book, the prettier the woman the happier it makes me, but I could be wrong. My instinct tells me that a pretty woman keeps a man on his toes. No beautiful woman will stay with a man who doesn’t deserve her — not in the long run, anyway. But I’ve also noticed that many — though not all — very beautiful women are not very happy. Why is that?

Richard Spencer made the front page of the New York Times two days in a row last week, and earned a half-page report on the third day. For any of you who have never heard of him — and very few have — he is described by the mendacious Times as the leader of the ‘white nationalist movement’, a movement not too many of us who believe in the white race are aware of. Let’s start at the beginning. After I ‘sold’ the American Conservative magazine to a man called Uns for one dollar — I have kept the cheque and will cash it only if in terrible need — I invited Richard Spencer to visit me in my New York house where I offered him the job of running my website, Takimag. (He had worked at the magazine but been laid off.