High life
French lessons
Taki
Kifissia
one of the most agreeable recollections of my youth is the time I spent in Kifissia, the green and pleasant resort town that lies eight miles north of Athens. There were pine and oleander lined streets, parks, hansom cabs, grand rococo villas, and the kind of grand hotels Vicky Baum wrote about in her novels. This was more than 30 years ago. It was just about 20 years ago that the neo-Hellenes discovered that the in- ternal combustion engine makes more noise and produces more pollution than the donkey, and it has been all downhill ever since. Polluting the atmosphere and making a din are the modern Greek's favourite pur- suits. Finding unpolluted and quiet places seems to be another. Finding them and ruining them, that is.
Kifissia was ruined just about ten years ago. I have spent the last two weeks with a friend who still owns a house here, and it has been like trying to rekindle a love affair . with someone who has grown old and
coarse with too much drink and tobacco. Although there are flashes of past glories, like a sudden smell of roast peanut or of lavender and jasmine, they are too few and far apart to make up for the pain of nostalgia. The streets are now clogged with cars and bikes, the grand villas have disap- peared and flats have risen in their place, the pines have burned and the grand hotels are derelict, their owners letting them deteriorate on purpose in order to be able to acquire building permits for supermarkets or flats. There are a few hansom cabs still in service but riding them accentuates the hor- ror of modern life.
I don't know why but every time I return to Greece in the summer I choose to go back to some of the places where I spent my youth, and it is always a disaster. This year, however, I have sworn never to return. From now on I shall spend my summer holidays in places I first went to when 1 was already a middle-aged man; like the ludicrous Hamptons of Long Island. For the moment though, I am stuck with memories of things past. This week, on 15 August, like another short but great man who was also born on the same day but in the year 1769, I shall be 45.
The second anniversary I shall be celebrating this week is almost as painful. It was 30 years ago, exactly on my 15th birth- day, that a young lady of the Martinez bar in Cannes accepted a 20-dollar bill so I could truthfully claim to be celibate no longer. Although those kind of ladies were my favourites until rather recently, they did manage to give me the type of education so few Englishmen get when they're young, Tony Lambton and John Profumo being
the exception. And it is the kind of educa- tion I think is imperative if a young man Is to grow into a responsible one as far as women are concerned. Like the present-day Greeks, who got too much too soon and don't know how to preserve what is good, too many young Englishmen fail to go through a learning period where sex is con- cerned. These observations have been brought about by the conversations I've been having with certain young English people staying with my host. Also, the growing reputation, legendary I may say, of a certain young Oxford graduate whose girlfriend claims that he is one the world's greatest lovers. Supposing I suddenly took up golf and played two holes in par, would that make me a scratch golfer or eligible for the Masters? Humbly I have been sug- gesting to my young friends that thousands of holes of practice are necessary to become a great golfer.
But they don't believe me. If practice made perfect, they say, every young girl would be lining up in front of dirty old men like me. I say that they should, and just as people are wrong about wrecking their en- vironment, so are the young misguided about who they should have sex with until they settle down and get married. My friend Jeff Bernard agrees with me on this subject. And although it is one of the few things we agree on, it is not a coincidence that sexual experience has nothing to do with money or the lack of it. He had little and I had more, but we both had a good start where sex was concerned by paying for it. That is why we both suffer from nostalgia. One never ap- preciates a product as much if one has not had to pay for it.
It is like Kifissia. Thirty years ago it was expensive and available to those who could afford it. Now it is cheap and available to everyone. And fun no more.
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