High life
Losing ground
Taki
Athens
This has been a hectic week, starting with my ignoble defeat in the Annabel's race on 1 April. I came a credible third, but only because most of the competitors did a Car- rington and had their minds elsewhere dur- ing the last part of the race. A 19-year-old guardsman won it, followed by another 19-year-old rugby specialist, and then it was poor little me, for the first time feeling beyond my years and realising that the jig is up. I was last for most of the race and then gave it the old college try and just about had a heart attack, in fact I suspect I might have had a minor one because my chest still hurts, and the more snorts I take to relieve it the worse the pain gets. And speaking of Carrington, why do the press keep referring to him as the aristocratic-looking Lord Car- rington. He looks as aristocratic as a gentle- man's gentleman, or worse, as a stock- broker pretending to be a shipowner from
Cyprus. Furthermore, if he was a lord at heart, he would have already done the only thing a man does under such circumstances: taken the Japanese solution and opened up his stomach. Needless to say, the real ar- chitect of the ludicrous state of Britain's defences, the man whose only redeeming feature is the close resemblance his eye- brows have to those of Groucho Marx, the ghastly Denis Healey, should follow suit. But l don't expect he will. Labour Members of Parliament have never been accused of having anything in common with Japanese samurai, except for the occasional stab in the back.
As I was racing to Heathrow in order to catch a British Airways flight to Athens, one that was only an hour and a half late, the driver aptly summarised England's posi- tion in the world today. 'We're like an Arab sultan,' he said, 'touching new bottoms every day.' Which reminded me of an old saying about inefficient ministers. The one about Carrington — a man I've loathed ever since he sold out Rhodesia — goes like this: 'The only difference between Carr- ington and Selwyn Lloyd is that the latter knew what he was doing during Suez.'
Now that British Airways have done away with first class, the club class com- partment is filled with BA executives and other freebee trippers. As usual I had a slight altercation with the man next to me once he had volunteered the information that he was a civil servant from Cyprus. The gentleman — I use that term loosely — then proceeded to attack the West in general and the USA in particular. Well, for once I took it without saying much. But when he refer- red to the Polish quisling as President Jaruzelski, and to Jose Napoleon Duarte as the head of the Salvador junta, I had had enough. My answer was interrupted by the stewardess who first asked, then insisted, and finally threatened to remove one of us forcibly unless we changed seats. I yelled the most so the Cypriot — a man who smelled to high heaven incidentally — was persuaded to move. Like a two-year-old I gave him an open palm insult as he was leaving, and like a one-year-old he tried to get the stewardess to censure me for it. It was worse than childish, but since when have politics in the birthplace of unfulfilled election promises not been? The gloomy atmosphSePredecaot(niftiinouAepdril0:98c: we had landed. Athens is one of the most polluted and boring cities in the world. Bu when it rains it becomes hellish. I had flown in to see my father and brother on business matter, so I couldn't go out and get completely wrecked and forget. Instead I sat around reading the Greek newspapers' an act commensurate with self flagellation at best. And what did I see? A large Picture of my father posing next to a man ealle,,c1 Harilaos Florakis, the head of the Greet' Communist Party. Florakis is an avuncular' looking fellow, but so was Adolph Eichmann. Florakis was better known over 30 years ago as Captain Yotis, a man whose particular talents lay in cutting the throats of people with the uneven open end of a can of beans. He was condemned to death hut, was given an amnesty after the Colonels fall. He now sits in Parliament and hobnobs with shipowners. When I asked daddy what they had had to say to each other, my father told rne tr; be quiet and mind my own business. M. am now more dependent than ever on his munificence, I have decided to be a g°,°, son and say nothing. But 1 do won",,e', whether father after all these years might turn out to be another Blunt. And I d°1/,` mean where sexual preference is concerned' After all, my brother was named 10.61°,5 (joy of the people) long before Floralo, began practising surgery withoncil anaesthetic on nationalists. Perhaps he and father were friends even then. PerhaP" there has been a red under my bed all along. It's the uncertainty that's beginning to make me prematurely old.
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