High life
What a lark
Taki
Gstaad h, dear! I feel for that poor, unknown Athenian hoplite who ran 26 miles 385 yards to Athens, announced our victory over the towelheads, dropped dead of exhaustion and insured immortality for . . . Pheidippides! For any of you unfamil- iar with the real deal, Pheidippides was a general, and generals did not carry mes- sages, lowly grunts did. Pheidippides had been sent to Sparta in order to get help, running the gauntlet of lions and various other wild things. The year was 490 BC, and the Athenian telecommunications sys- tem had broken down. (So what else is new?) Old Pheidippides made it in three days, a world record, but the wily Spartans sat on their shields.
By the time he got back to my birthplace, the towelheads had been routed by Milti- ades in what J.S. Mill called the most important battle ever to have taken place. Our victory meant that Western civilisation would flourish, and that the English and other barbarian tribes would learn from us Greeks not to eat roots and scratch their furry parts in public. (Until post-Fifties Hollywood, that is.) But back to the unknown hoplite. Last week, on a lark, I made a telephone call, got to speak to a famous blonde lady, wrote a silly story about it, and, presto, I became Pheidippides for a week. Although we are smack in the middle of the silly season, I still can't believe that the hacks are so starved of news that the poor little Greek boy is now front page material.
Mind you, I'm not complaining. It just goes to show it's better to be in the right place at the right time, than to be in the know. All I did was lift the Ameche. The next thing was instant immortality. Lord Rees-Mogg in the Times has placed me square in the Pantheon by revealing the hitherto undiscovered dialogue between Socrates and yours truly. (I know, I know, it may have been tongue in cheek, but peo- ple who look at videos won't know, and they make up the great majority of the earth's population.) I thank the noble lord from the bottom of my heart, and solemnly swear that the next trireme I launch will be named The William.
Needless to say, none of my new-found celebrity has reached the natives. Everyone is too busy arguing the pros and cons of a decision that will make Gstaad a car-free village come October. The most famous Gstaad Greek since Pheidippides is for it, as I was for the already finished bypass that will divert traffic, keep the town pollution- free, and enable people to drive to work without having to tail-gate blondes window- shopping in their Ferraris. (Incidentally, Lord Hanson's piece on the hypocrisy behind the attack on motorists is required reading. 'How many cars have been given up on environmental grounds by green protesters?' asks Hanson, in last week's Express on Sunday.) `Completely different personalities. One's a "I wanna" and the other's a "I don't wanna".' Gstaad is universally accepted as being the most beautiful spot in Switzerland. What has spoiled it is traffic. People who come to Gstaad are not exactly on the dole. Some of them are even known to own more than one car. A few even have ser- vants whom they send shopping along with their blondes or blonds. Even out of sea- son, the traffic on main street — the only street — at times resembles the exodus of the Kuwait royal family in August of 1990.
All this is over come October. People will be free to walk, shop, eat al fresco in the middle of the village, without the occa- sional Porsche driven by a hooker over- revving and scaring some of the Filipino waiters half to death. It is going to be bliss, thanks to the bypass. And speaking of bliss, I have decided to climb the Matterhorn. No, not because it's there, but because I've just read Into Thin Air, the account of last year's Everest disaster by John Krakauer. And no, I am not going to do a Sandy Pittman, the socialite and social climbing ex-wife of the vulgarian who invented MTV. (She was almost carried up and down, exhausting the guides and Sherpas.) I hope to go up next year all by my little self with one guide showing me the way. The Matterhorn isn't exactly Everest, but then I am not as great a (social) moun- taineer as Ms Pittman.
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