High life
Proud to be Greek
Taki
Aeveryone who has ever attended boarding school knows, dishing it out but not being able to take it is the quintessen- tial sign of the bully. Having lambasted people for 14 years in these pages, I sud- denly find myself doing an Orlando Furioso over a rather flattering profile of yours truly which appears in this month's Taller. The problem is the theme of the piece — sex and money, the only things that sell papers nowadays. Let me explain.
When Christa D'Souza, a pretty and very talented hackette, first rang to do a story on me I refused. 'Unless you write about my sex life and spending habits it will be too anodyne,' said the greatest Greek writ- er since Plutarch. 'And I absolutely refuse to co-operate on those two subjects.'
But Christa kept trying and of course 1 gave in. Mind you, she got me on the week- end, and on my boat. Although I try and show my worst side week in week out in the Speccy pages, I actually work quite hard during the week when in the Big Olive. On Friday evenings during the summer I go on the boat, get drunk and stay drunk until Sunday night. That is when we met. Need- less to say, I spoke non-stop about girls because we were in Mykonos, a place con- ducive only to sex and c'est tout. The result was a very nice piece about a sex-crazed buffoon who doesn't know the difference between, say, a Titian and a pair of tits. I am certain that people who regularly appear in Conde Nasty publications would have been flattered: people like Fergie, Princess Michael or Paddy McNally. Strange as it may sound, however, I am not a low-lifer, and never was. But it's my fault, no one else's. Christa did her duty, and I was a fool as usual. Ironically, only two things rankled (except for the sex): being called a man who covered wars from the sun deck (eight years in places like Saigon, Hue, Amman and Beirut I guess don't count), and a quote by one Nick Simunek about me wanting to have been born an Englishman.
Simunek I hardly know, but I did lend him a large amount of money once when he was very hard up. I thought his joke was very unfair. I am very proud to be Greek, in fact I cannot think of anything better to be. (Think of our past and you'll forget all about our present.) If I weren't a Hellene, 1 would like to have been a German, and then an Italian. Although I have many very good friends in England, I do not admire such upper-class traits as nastiness, lack of generosity of spirit and deep hate and envY- I love the Latin traits of warmth, romance and refusal to conceal feelings. So there.
Mind you, it's not even a storm In 3 teacup. In all truthfulness I'm over the moon because Fidel Castro, the Sandinistas and Princess Michael of Kent have all yet again been in the press: Castro and his fel- low commies for being caught selling cocaine, Marie-Christine (according to the Times) for once more borrowing other peo- ple's work. Christine Sutherland's bio of Maria Walewska is the definitive work on the subject, so I guess the Austrian knows, to borrow from the best. When a friend of mine rang someone in the trade to inquire about the latest plagiarism they told her, `Royals are expected to cheat'.
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