Taki

New York   It’s party time in the Bagel, and it’s about time, too. Good restaurants and elegant nightclubs are now a thing of the past, at least here in New York, so it’s home sweet home for the poor little Greek boy, for dinner, drinks and even some dancing at times. Here in my Bagel house my proudest possessions are my three Oswald Birley pictures. One is enormous and covers the whole wall of the entrance hall. The other two are a self-portrait and one of a rather grand lady. They are masterfully executed portraits, with aesthetic as well as psychological realism, an extremely difficult goal for an artist to achieve. Birley is more than equal to contemporaries such as Augustus John and John Lavery.

Gstaad I have two special girlfriends, Lynne and Fiona, the ladies who guard The Spectator’s entrance against the outraged #MeToo gels and woke lackeys who occasionally take umbrage against the poor little Greek boy’s scribbling. My guardian angels recently sent me some personal letters posted long ago, which I will eventually answer, especially one from Lady Mary Gaye Curzon, a very old friend, whose beautiful daughter Cressida — a Spectator Notebook contributor — dodged a bullet when Harry Halfwit went Hollywood. Although months in arrears, please accept my apologies, Helen Holland, Mary Ruskin and Anthony Johnson; such are the joys of the mail during and after a pandemic.

New York I’ve never met anyone called Othello, certainly not in Venice nor in Cyprus, but perhaps there are men by that name in Africa. Someone who was referred to as Othello, but always behind his back, was the greatest of all Russians, Alexander Pushkin: a ‘raging Othello’ was how les mauvaises langues in court described the great poet. Pushkin’s great-grandfather, General A.P. Gannibal, was Ethiopian. I’ll get back to Othello in a jiffy, but first a few words about marital jealousy and Pushkin. The poet got a bee in his bonnet soon after marrying the beautiful but coquettish Natalia because she flirted, harmlessly but nevertheless disastrously.

New York Don’t let anyone tell you the Bagel is worse off than Kabul, where three people were recently shot dead by Islamist gunmen for playing music at a wedding. No siree, people over here are shot every day and night but not for playing music at a wedding. Give New York credit where it’s due. The city is a bloody horror if you’re living way uptown, way downtown, or in the Bronx, with the rest of Gotham experiencing a level of street crime not seen in a decade. Robberies and felonious assaults are up 15 per cent in a year and gun arrests by a whopping 20 per cent. In the subway violent crime per ride is twice as high as in 2019.

There’s a narrow stretch of Chelsea, south of the King’s Road from Oakley Street to Ormonde Gate, that reminds me of post-war London when I first came here with my dad. Names such as Margaretta Terrace, St Loo Avenue, Alpha Place and Robinson Street bring back sweet memories of youthful innocence and desire. London back then was big on rep but ranked last on comfort. Much later, towards the end of the 1950s, Queen’s Club held the second biggest tennis tournament in the land and had just one shower in the men’s locker room. (With a dirty white curtain.) It is often said that schoolboys derive no benefit from fine architecture, and it was certainly true in my case, but what I did take in was the mood.

New York I find most films nowadays as fascinating as a lengthy history of orthodontics but then I’m spoilt rotten, having watched old black-and-white pearls such as From Here to Eternity, The Asphalt Jungle and My Man Godfrey. When Chariots of Fire came out some 40 years ago I went bananas. My uncle had competed in the hurdles in both the 1932 and 1936 Olympics, and my father was on the relay team. Athletics back then were for pure amateurs only, and as in the case of the great Jim Thorpe, anyone caught having ever been paid even a dollar for competing in any sport in or out of the Olympics was obliged to give the medal back. Chariots of Fire captured the will, luminosity and purity of the amateur athlete who competes honourably for glory and would rather die than cheat.

New York   ‘The City of London is hiding the world’s stolen money’, screams a Bagel Times headline, as bogus a message as that caricature of a newspaper’s other examples of anti-white, anti-cop, anti-male and anti-Conservative platforms. (‘Bid the binary goodbye’ is another pearl.) Not that anyone any longer takes the Bagel Times seriously since it decided that whites are very bad people. Still, I found it amusing that London is responsible for the shame of the Pandora Papers, when most of the miscreants involved are Third World dictators and eastern oligarchs. Never mind.

They have stepped into the pop-culture spotlight via the HBO hit Succession, a hatchet job on the very rich and powerful produced by the very rich and much more powerful Adam McKay (The Big Short). McKay started off by doing a lot of cheesy comedies, made a large fortune, and then went after Wall Street types. Nothing wrong with that; films are supposed to go after the rich and powerful, and always have. It’s the media’s coverage of a TV series about a fictional family that is slanted and totally false. The media hint that the mogul and patriarch Logan Roy is based on Rupert Murdoch, and that Roy’s dysfunctional family represents Rupert’s. In reality, the Roy bunch are freaks and drug addicts who are incapable of getting anything right.

Around 20 or so years ago I had a point for match point on a perfect grass court at Fort Belvedere. We’d been playing for close to two hours. I remember hitting a topspin backhand down the line, going to the net and seeing my ball just miss the tramline. I was perfectly positioned to call the ball out. My opponent, thinking I would approach with a crosscourt, was covering his backhand side. He called my ball in. ‘Ball was out,’ said I. ‘I saw it in and it was in,’ said Galen Weston, my host at the Fort and a very good tennis player. It verged on the parodic, the ensuing so-called argument about who was right. Galen prevailed, and I eventually won the match. He then lent me his best pony to stick and ball on his polo ground and play one against one.

Do any of you remember the time when everything took place on the terraces and in outdoor cafés? Before everyone retreated into laptops and mobile telephones and Twitter? When the streets thrummed with possibility and the potential for new encounters was everywhere? Well, that’s all gone now, thanks to some pretty ugly-looking fellows with names such as Dorsey and Zuckerberg. But we’re the ones who adopted their useless inventions and live by them as if they were the Sermon on the Mount. The social consequences have been devastating — the young make noises instead of articulating speech — and had Cassandra been around 20 or so years ago she would have warned us against the tech companies that have the power to change our way of life. Never mind.

It’s nice to be back in London, and Glebe Place is a delight. Mind you, it’s not the mansion I was expecting, just a very nice mews house on a very quiet part of the street away from the King’s Road. The noise of the city gets on my nerves, which means that I’ve lived on an island, and among cows, for too long. Alexandra seems to like London more than I do nowadays, and that’s a switch if ever there was one. Knightsbridge was home for 40-odd years, but the wife hated it. Writing about one’s wife is a bit like kissing your sister and all that, but ensconced at home the other night I asked her: why London all of a sudden. ‘You were playing Don Giovanni all those years, and I found it humiliating to be near those women,’ was her answer.

Memories for me are like beautifully edited copy: all cleaned up and retaining only the good parts. The wife tells me that I’m quite lucky in choosing to remember just pleasant things, and of course I agree. Actually it’s not really a choice; it is almost automatic. Bad things are tucked away immediately, never to return. I suppose many idiots enjoy such forgetfulness, but then I’d rather be called an idiot than a surly grouch, complaining and finding fault with everything and everyone. Needless to say, I cannot forget Pentonville. Looking back, I recall only fun times among my fellow convicts. There was Warren, the large black man whose appeal I had to draw up because he was illiterate.

Gstaad Mercedes Benz heir Mick Flick and I have been friends for more than half a century. We both married Schoenburgs, both like the odd drink, both adore the fair sex, and we are now both candidates for a visit from the man in the white suit, yours truly first in line. Mick gave a wonderful dinner the other evening for around 30 of us. It was in his upper chalet, the one that’s half art gallery and half live-in space. He also has a lower chalet for his two sons and daughter. The dinner was seated and the wine was Latour. I think I had two bottles before the wife dragged me away using all sorts of excuses. The last thing I remember was Mick laughing as I was being led out. I had hosted a somewhat similar shindig the previous week, and Mick sat on my wife’s right.

Gstaad   Good manners aside, what I miss nowadays is a new, intelligent, finely acted movie. Never have I seen so much garbage as there is on TV: sci-fi trash, superhero rubbish, dystopian crap and junk about ugly, solipsistic youths revolting against overbearing parents. The director Jimmy Toback blames the subject matter for the lousy content, driven as it is by the need for diversity. I think lack of talent is the culprit. The non-stop use of the F-word is a given in Hollywood productions. Combined with constant violence, it makes for a lousy and unwatchable film.

Gstaad When Gerald Murphy and Cole Porter discovered the French Riviera as a summer resort during the early 1920s, the swells and avant-gardes still spent the warm months in cool places like Deauville and Baden-Baden. I think of the deserted summer Riviera and how marvellous the place must have been when people like Picasso and Hemingway joined forces with Cole and Gerald and launched the resort to end all resorts. No longer. The place is now an overcrowded hellhole, expensive, dirty and dangerous, but not to worry.

 Gstaad It seems to be open season on the royals, starting with Prince Andrew and the charges against him by Virginia Roberts Giuffre. I’ve met Andrew a couple of times, but he wouldn’t know me from Adam. I’ve never met anyone who has had anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein except for Ghislaine Maxwell, who has problems of her own just now. Like everyone else, however, I have my opinions about this motley crew. Lawyers have already killed some of my columns on this subject these past three years alone, so I better lay off the subject. What I am certain of I cannot publish, so I will write only that in my view the prince is a fool but no rapist.

Coronis Embracing one’s vulnerability seems to have replaced the higher, faster, stronger ethos of the Olympics. The very frailty that makes us human appears to have triumphed over the need to excel, or so the Games sponsors tell us. Not that I watched any of it. Not a single second, so help me you-know-who. I liked Sebastian Coe’s remark in last week’s Speccie about taking advice from Djokovic, who quit the mixed, thus leaving his partner in the lurch. I’ve always liked and admired Coe and always mistrusted the Serb, but then I’m a small-timer where sport is concerned. One thing I’ve never done is quit, however, and I did compete at a high level in tennis, karate, even polo.

Patmos A very long time ago I wrote in these here pages that spending a summer on the Riviera or the Greek isles without a boat was as useless as a eunuch in a cathouse. That was then and this, alas, is now. The French and Greek seas are the same, if a little bit more crowded, but the people with boats are very, very different. Back then one knew almost everyone worth knowing — that is, everyone with a smart sailing boat, and a few with gin palaces that were graceful. These modern horrors that look like refrigerators on steroids, with top-heavy superstructures from bow to stern, helicopters, jet skis and even submarines on board, chartered to celebrities with hookers included, have killed elegant yachting and then some.

Isle of Patmos Two hundred years ago last March, the Greeks rose up against the hated Turks who had occupied most of the mainland for 400 years and, with the help of Britain, France and Russia, drove the infidels back to where they had come from. The war ended with the London Protocol of 1830, which recognised the creation of the independent nation-state called Greece. Hellas, as we call her, became the first independent nation in the Balkans and the first to break away from the Ottoman Empire. The Society of Friends, which had been founded in 1814 outside Greece and included members of my family, had established the groundwork for the uprising. The seed was the American Revolution, followed by the French one.

Patmos I’m in Patmos with four grandchildren, two children, and a wife. I know, I know, it sounds very lower--middle-class and only Bournemouth and some sunbeds are missing, but who cares. Children have friends, and grandchildren even younger friends, so it’s not all gloom and doom. The princely Schwarzenbergs are here — the mother is Greek — and so is half of Vienna, not to mention Florence, Venice and Rome. At dinner the other night up at the piazza, which holds about 40 tables, there was not a single Philip Green-type among the guests, and looking back I cannot remember having had a more pleasant dinner setting ever, other than perhaps once in Sienna long ago.