High life
Overcast
Taki
New York T am back again, although I was not 1 aware of ever having been away. It seems I failed to make clear to my sainted editor my fanatical purity of intention. Tani pis. From now on I must try and remember the old cliché that says that you only upset yourself by your sins, but you upset others by your confessions; as well as the one about the most boring way of writing being to tell all. So here I am, with a boring past and a doomed future. What else can I call it? That morbid rondo I once thought my life had turned into has now become one of convention. The recur- ring theme is one of bourgeois happiness. Wives, children, houses in the country, even luncheons with the equivalent of Charles Benson's tailor, England's most pa- tient man, my publisher. This modern-day Job has commissioned me to write a book and I've convinced him that I have a chapter or two to go. In fact I haven't even begun the outline, but I suppose publishers know that when one says that one's about through, it is as likely to be true as an Argentine tabloid's headline. In the mean- time, however, my usual anger, self- destructive streak and lust have given way to comfort and expedience. It is a bit like old Pro fumo andLambton. Disgrace without dishonour. Just as well my old London cronies can't see me. The one who did witness my rather sad and depleted state last week was that professor emeritus of modern anthropology, Dr Nigel Dempster. In fact he was so intrigued by my sudden metamorphosis that he studied me all weekend long. Being an astute judge of human weakness he found the courage of his condescension before leaving and pro- nounced me as dull as a dial tone.
Dullness, of course, has its good points. Spending time with one's children might be considered a waste of time by most of my jet-setting friends, but I find it has its ad- vantages. For one thing, they are like dogs. In the Aldous Huxley sense. 'To his dog,' Huxley said, 'every man is Napoleon.' And like Napdleon pacing up and down the deck of the Bellerophon, I spent the weekend strutting on my Southampton lawn, gazing at the Atlantic Ocean with a furrowed brow. My daughter often asks me if I am the strongest man in the world, and I always reply in the affirmative. The reason she asks is because she watches me pump iron, and she is as intrigued at my efforts to lift a bar weighing more than I do, as my new good friend, Vladimir Bukovski, is non-plussed. Bukovski was over here lecturing and trying to raise some money for Afganistan. When we dined together I teased him by reading to him what some Ieft-wing hack had writ- ten about him. He didn't seem at all in- terested. What tickled his biologist's curiosity was my lifting weights and pun- ching a bag. He also was intrigued by the fact that rich people are more likely to con- tribute money for guano pickers in Tierra del Fuego, than for a radio transmitter in Afganistan. So I clued him in about the rich and their charitable ways.
After. Vladimir left Southampton, pr Dempster drove up with the newly nou- veau riche writer, Anthony Haden-Guest- Nigel spent all weekend running, in training for the London Marathon, while Anthony forgot the fact that he's now a rich man, and kept dialling people in far-away places. Throughout I complained about how un- successful I'd been in raising money with Vladimir, and Nigel told me an amusing story about a very rich, quite disgusting, but very generous multi-millionaire who has since joined his maker. Just after Charlie Clore was knighted he bought 2,000 acres near Hungerford and went about becoming a gent. He hired a top executive from Holland and Holland and began practising at Ruislip. Finally the great day arrived; an invitation to shoot at Blenheim. Clore asked his teacher to ac- company him. The man agreed. During the lunch break, when the guns went to the nearest woodkeeper's cottage and the feudal hirelings were sent elsewhere, Clore approached old Bert Marlborough. 'Par- don me, Bert,' he said. 'My loader isn t really a loader, he's a gent like you, a direc- tor of 'olland and 'olland.' To which Bert Marlborough, with his customary chasm replied: 'Really, Clore, you had that man! teach you how to shoot all morning, now I suppose you want him to teach you how to eat!
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