Taki

One reason I do not tweet, text, use Facebook or Instagram, and only wield a mobile when a landline is unavailable, is that all of the above gadgets are free of anything that resembles a credible spoken word emanating from a disease-free brain. The mind-numbing gobbledygook that billions send back and forth constitutes a sort of tenth circle of Dante’s Inferno: oxygen-deprived brains, with their imaginations up their backsides, are strung out on their own solipsism; benighted, boring and brain-jolting in their braggadocio. Whew, I finally got that off my chest.

   Gstaad The locals here in the beautiful Saanen valley are split over the migrant crisis. Switzerland does not belong to the EU, but the fascists in Brussels have pressed good old Helvetia to open its doors to those streaming out of Africa and the Middle East. Switzerland, a tiny country of eight million, has already taken in 40,000, and I have personally seen about 30 Eritreans billeted in our old people’s home nearby. Now it takes a heart of stone to be against poor refugees, especially Syrians, unless they’re North Africans or Somalis who are over here in order to find white women or live off our welfare system.

Gstaad I had the rather subversive idea of offering a six-figure sum to Oriel College, Oxford. On one condition: that the college immediately withdraw the Rhodes scholarship from the South African Ntokozo Qwabe, the hypocrite who led the campaign to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes, and from any other recipients of Cecil’s munificence who are blackening his name a century later. It is the least these hypocrites deserve. Oxbridge has become a joke in the way it tries to emulate the LSE in radicalism and other such ludicrous poses. The group that called Jihadi John ‘a beautiful young man’ should be allowed to speak at Oxford, according to the jerk that is the warden of Wadham College, Oxford, yet Germaine Greer is banned.

Athens Viewed from Mars, this is a sunny, peaceful city. Up close, however, things ain’t what they used to be. First, those wonderful Greek smiles are gone, replaced by wintry ones at best. People are worried, as well they should be. At the Divani Caravel hotel, once owned by yours truly, the staff greet me as though I were a conquering hero. I was a benevolent owner who used to party and spread the wealth. Now things are more professional, and the hotel is profitable because of expert management. The staff is the best in Athens by far. The migrant crisis is secondary, from what I hear. Pension reform and the country’s creditors are on a collision course, with daily strikes impeding any growth to an economy that’s hit rock-bottom.

The Dolly Sisters were off to Davos last week for the World Economic Forum: Nat Rothschild and Sebastian Taylor in their finest playing up to Harry Selfridge, in reality Christine Lagarde, the IMF chief. This total waste of a week advertises itself as a discussion of the global issues of the day. In reality, it’s utter twaddle, unless one is networking like the Dolly Sisters, or showing off like Justin Trudeau, the Canadian premier whose mother is Margaret, once upon a time a Studio 54 regular and a friend of yours truly. Old Greek ship-owning families, prominent ones such as the Livanoses, Goulandrises and Chandrises, eschew such shenanigans, leaving them to that downmarket version of Zorba the Greek, Alexis Tsipras.

The death of David Bowie — how is it that Stephen Glover always gets it right about our over-reaction and hysteria when a pop star goes the way of all of us? — triggered a memory of something that happened long ago with Iman, his still beautiful widow. It was exactly 30 years ago, on a rainy and cold night in New York. But first, a brief background to the story. In the winter of 1985 the mother of my children had taken them to Paris, to her mother’s, as a warning to me that my constant womanising would no longer be tolerated. At the same time, an English friend of mine in London had run off with yet another friend, a male, thus making it obvious that I was about to lose both a wife and a mistress.

Gstaad War and Peace has been in the news lately, so what was it that Leo wrote about all happy families being alike? Tolstoy came to mind last week right here in Gstaad, when I encountered probably the worst-looking family I’ve had the bad luck to run into in the past 79 years. I wonder if Count Tolstoy ever considered writing a saga about how ugly families are all different in their ugliness. It was early evening and I walked into the Posthotel, where Papa Hemingway once stayed while researching A Farewell to Arms. (He climbed daily on skins and schussed down after fortifying himself with glühwein.) Hemingway, alas, was not around, but a family that was obviously from the Gulf was. To call it a freak show would be too charitable.

OK sports fans, what do Dame Vivien Duffield and Evelyn Waugh have in common? The answer is absolutely nothing, so why start 2016 with such a dumb question? Waugh was short and round and so is Vivien, but apart from weight and height there are no similarities. So why ask? Easy. I was reading about a dinner party Waugh gave for Clare Luce in November 1949 at the Hyde Park Hotel. He later wrote to Nancy Mitford complaining how much money the dinner had cost him, and how Clare — in my not so humble opinion the greatest woman of the 20th century — had failed to write a thank-you note. Waugh was a hell of a writer but a pretty piss-poor human being. He was petty, a closeted tortured gay with seven children.

This is going to be one hell of a year, hell being the operative word. It will be the year the greatest Greek writer since Homer turns 80 (but we’ll keep quiet about that for the moment). Our world is so stuck in reverse that a woman who was stabbed in Miami during the Art Basel shindig, and was bleeding and begging for help, was mistaken for an artwork and ignored. The woman survived but will art? Conceptual art must be the biggest con since Bernie Madoff and then some. And speaking of con artists, I’ve never had any respect for Mark Zuckerberg, someone who is reputed to have copied the idea for Facebook from a couple of ex-classmates, and who now pledges the majority of his $45 billion fortune to charity thereby generating a public relations bonanza.

Have we ever needed Christianity more than we do today? It’s a rhetorical question, for sure, because the loss of our faith and the inability to confront Islam have never been greater. When I was a little boy during the war, my mother assured me that if I believed in Jesus everything would be OK. This was during the Allied bombing on Tatoi, the military airfield near our country house where the Germans concentrated their anti-aircraft guns. My Fräulein, the Prussian lady who brought me up, was more practical. She handed me a beautiful carved knife that made me feel safer than my prayers ever did. Today, of course, 74 years later, my prayers are far more likely to give me peace of mind than a knife in my pocket. That’s the difference between being five and 79 years of age.

 New York Things turn very frivolous around this time of year. Barf-inducing parties given by pop-culture schlock merchants selling their wares are a nightly transgression. The hacks duly report the shenanigans of doped-up rappers the next day as once upon a time they detailed the haut monde. London isn’t much better. Last week, at the British Fashion Awards, a designer by the name of Jonathan Anderson said that he was ‘honoured to be on the same stage as Karl Lagerfeld’ — a bum-clenchingly vapid pronouncement if ever I’ve heard one. Lagerfeld is a preening, self-important freak whose trademark is rudeness and that other badge of ultimate ghastliness, the ponytail.

What does one do, attend or refuse a party after a tragic event such as the recent Paris outrage? My son happens to live next to Place de la République, where the massacre of innocents by those nice Islamists showing off their manhood took place. He was having dinner with his two little children when the shooting started. Luckily, they’re all OK, but I spent a terrible couple of hours trying to get through after the news came over the TV screens. The next evening in New York, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Costume Institute was celebrating The Art of Style with a black-tie dinner honouring Jacqueline de Ribes, the international style icon whose dresses are being exhibited there. I was of two minds, then decency prevailed and the whole thing was called off.

Those who forget the pasta are condemned to reheat it, tweeted Jon Ronson, a man I’d never heard of until his quip about spaghetti. I read about the tweet in a newspaper, as I’ve never used social media — Twitter, Facebook, Instagram — and hope that I never will. Why would I, unless I wanted to make trouble for myself? Not everyone needs to know what you’re doing all of the time. Or any of the time, for that matter. They say that the most destructive four-letter word in the digital domain is ‘send’. (Just as the scariest three words in American literature are Joyce Carol Oates.) I recently received an email from a young woman I’ve occasionally taken out to dinner calling me all sorts of names.

I have finally moved into my new flat, a jewel of a place in a pre-first world war Park Avenue building. The finishing touches won’t be made until Christmas 2016, as work is only permitted during the two summer months. That is the way it should be. The past three years have been agony for me. I’ve been living in an apartment that shook all day while Jeff Koons, a so-called artist, was putting up a behemoth in the shape of a house directly behind me. Worse, a Russian oligarch, who had hired dodgy construction workers to tear down and rebuild a monument to his thievery, had them ignore night-time regulations, which made sleep impossible. I had sold my brownstone when my children chose to live in Europe and my household staff announced the stairs were too many and too steep.

To Cleveland, Ohio, where middle America’s middle class begins its great Midwest sprawl. I’ve always wanted to visit Cleveland because the so-called sophisticates poke fun at it. And the place did not disappoint. Beautiful municipal buildings of fascist Roman style line the shores of Lake Erie — public libraries, city halls, opera house, large public spaces, you get my drift. The people are friendly, unlike the aggressive slobs that pass for Noo Yawkers nowadays. The purpose of the visit was to moderate a debate, visit Chronicles magazine staff and rub elbows with Chronicles readers, who showed up in force. Among the numerous speakers was the great Pat Buchanan, three-time presidential candidate and a true blue conservative writer who has kept the faith throughout.

As everyone knows, journalists tend to take themselves seriously, especially American journalists, who take themselves very, very seriously. Dan Rather was such a man, and I use the past tense because although he’s still very much alive, he’s no longer a big shot. Dan used to read the news on American television, and was referred to as an ‘anchor’. Anchors in America make much more money than the President, and match CEOs of big corporations in terms of what they rake in. Walter Cronkite, Dan’s predecessor at CBS, was always referred to as the most trusted man in America, a role the avuncular Walter revelled in. Dan took over in 1980 and got into trouble right away. He was kidnapped by a taxi driver right in Chicago and driven crazily around the town.

I once tried to bribe Zac Goldsmith with a £50 note, but he didn’t bite even back then. He was about 15 years old, and the reason for the hush money was pure self-preservation. He was already good-looking and I knew he’d be even more so at 20, so I offered him 50 quid to stay 20 feet away from me for the next 15 years if he saw me talking to a girl. My bribe worked with his younger brother Ben, who grabbed the loot and never kept his side of the bargain. That was in 1997, when Jimmy Goldsmith formed the Referendum party and I covered its first conference as Atticus in the Sunday Times. (Jimmy got very suspicious when he saw money being given to young Ben, until I told him the reason. He then advised Ben to take the money and ignore the deal.