High life
Tall story
Taki
Gstaad There are more Mercedes, Golf OTIs, and four-door Range Rovers in Gstaad than in Beverly Hills. This is the bad news. The good news is that the people who own such cultural flotsam and jetsam are rarely seen. Once one reaches the slopes, or the latglauf pistes, the materially immodest
Present a sorry sight — and a rare one. The
Unlike process begins at the queues. unlike other stations d'hiver, where a ski guide can purchase tickets and take his overlord to the front of the line, here it's first come first served. Once on top of the mountain, the equalisation procedure gets worse for the rich, the fat and the ugly. The good skier, not the rich slob, gets the girl. Gstaad is famous for its lack of queues, yet the traffic jams in the village resemble those on the Fulham Road on a Friday afternoon. In other words, a few ski and the rest prac- tise apres ski. At times I think this is a deliberate ploy by old Gstaad hands and ski lovers. Like Louis XIV — whose splendid life-style was part of a deliberate policy to Keel) his nobles away from meaningful government by entangling them in petty squabbles over social status — the sporty ones manage to keep the slopes clean by means of the social ethic they established long ago. When the profligates arrived the 13, id Gstaad lovers disappeared upwards. I have yet to see a single Arab on the slopes, although I did have the bad luck to literally Like into a ghastly Iranian the other day. Like the rest of his loathsome tribe, he shouted and shut his eyes like slit trenches for effect once he realised that if he were standing still he could not be held responsi- ble for a collision. Fortunately, he was the one who got hurt. (Here is a tip for any loyal Spectator readers who are about to be hit by someone who is out of control. Lift both legs as high as you can an instant before impact, like a jumping jack exercise. I guarantee that the other person will come off second best.) All this week the snow has been perfect and the sky cloudless. I langlauf in the morning, lunch with Bill Buckley, and then ski with him in the afternoon. Bill is a good skier and although I'm faster he somehow always manages to beat me to the bottom by acting the tortoise to my hare. He never stops and, more important, never shows off, thus remaining vertical for days on end; something that cannot be said of me. Discipline is second nature to Bill. he skis from 2 to 4.30, then goes back to his writing. He is at work on yet another novel, while doing his political journalism in the morning, the fiction, apres-ski, followed by his harpsichord playing and painting after dinner. I have always thought that people like Buckley are selfish, however. By managing to accomplish as much as he does, and have a good time in the process, he ruins it for the rest of us. How can peo- ple like Jeffrey Bernard and me compete? Anything over 700 words drives me straight to the bottle and, worse, to the snow. And I'm not talking about the kind one finds in Gstaad.
Still, the paranoia hasn't been bad this week. My friend Aleco Goulandris has a birthday that falls on the same day that Stalin croaked. He gave a great party and we had a double celebration. Then my friend Zographos, whom I am sure sneaks into people's rooms and reads their passports in order to discover their age and date of birth, remembered that that was also the day the mother of my children and I got married. Given three good reasons to be happy I got completely drunk and began to tell risque jokes in front of the King of 'I'm mad about you.'
Greece. Unlike the rest of the Greeks, however, he has a sense of humour. And he knows what President Nixon knew when he and I dined together rather intimately at Jonathan Aitken's house: that philosophy ain't my forte but jokes are.
While I am on the subject of jokes, it seems that California's most wanted man, Polanski the paedophile, is furious with me. In fact he stated categorically to some friends of rhine that if I came into a room he would leave it at once — which has made me almost forget skiing while I walk into any room I can, hoping to drive the pervert out of my favourite ski resort. But to no avail. I suppose he and I see different peo- ple. But perhaps I'm wrong and he's right. He is definitely correct about the reason he gave my friends for me hating the world. He said it was because I was short. Which I am. In fact the only person who is shorter than me in Gstaad is the pocket paedophile. And we all know that he loves people — so much in fact that the state of California wants him back. But enough of all that. With ski boots on I feel tall, and when I feel tall I love everyone. Even some of the slobs who have invaded my beloved Gstaad.
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