Singular life
High anxiety
Petronella Wyatt
Shock, horror! Tony Blair is presidential and Cherie dislikes the country. Poor Sophie Wessex, put in the stocks and pilloried for gross statement of the obvious. As for the fearless undercover reporter Sheikh
Mazher Mahmood less of a case of Lawrence of Arabia here, than Lawrence of Belgravia. Who paid the bill for his room at the Dorchester? I'd like to know. Has he declared it? Why should an unelected journalist abuse his position of mistrust in this way?
Have you ever noticed how girls called Sophie always make pathetically easy prey? Look at Sophie in The Razor's Edge. I suppose the ordinariness of the name gets them down. It would never have happened to a Petronella. Me, I wouldn't be seen dead in the Dorchester. This is why I have finally bitten the wallet and moved into the Lanesborough hotel. Actually, the wallet ought not to suffer one iota, as the insurance company is paying for it all, Oh, sweet mystery of life, Three guesses as to who is the public relations genius behind my new home. Yup, the Countess of Wessex. The Lanesborough is one of her best clients. Well, I am warning you. Sophie. If my boiled egg is just the tiniest smidgen overcooked, I shall be telephoning Rupert down at Wapping.
Not to mention if the dog doesn't find things up to scratch. The dog and I are suffering from high levels of anxiety. They say that, in terms of stress, moving house is one of the big four along with widowhood, divorce and the death of a parent. Friends have remarked on how 'gaunt' I have become. Or perhaps they meant staunch. Oh, God, save me from the candid friend.
In the last ten days I have indeed mislaid six pounds. Making oneself miserable is infinitely more efficacious than starving. On Saturday, I left the house where I was born. The walls had been stripped of pictures and the floors laid bare. The place had an air of death. The flowers in the hallway had ceased to bloom, deprived of the oxygen of companionship.
On my way out I noticed a piece of cardboard that had fallen off a table. It had belonged to my father who always placed it in the hall for guests to read on their way in. It said: 'I must ask anyone entering this house not to contradict or disagree with me in any way as it interferes with the function of my gastric juices and prevents my sleeping at night,' This stricture has accompanied me to the Lanesborough, where the maids peer at it with a puzzlement bordering on terror.
Even for a supine person like myself, it is disconcerting having everything done for you. It has a regressive effect, causing a sudden re-entry into the womb. I was a domestically illiterate person to begin with, less of a goddess and more of a satyr. Now, as Dr Johnson said of Garrick's Ode to Shakespeare, my life defies satire_ My suite might have been designed by Madame Recamier. The Lanesborough goes large on le style directoire, just before Napoleon got too big for his bottes, which is just as well as the hotel overlooks a whopping statue of the Duke of Wellington.
On my arrival, I was greeted by the head butler, Sean. 'I am your butler,' he announced. 'For the hotel?' I prompted. 'No, for you.' For me? A whole butler? What was I to ask him to do? 'Anything you like,' said Sean. He immediately proposed a 24-hour dog-walking service for Mimi the papillon. What time did she wish to go out in the morning. Five? Six? I said that she might well wish to gallivant like thunder as the dawn came up but her mistress preferred to be woken at 7.30.
After a few hours I found it impossible to stand on my own two feet. This included a sudden inability to get up to switch off lamps. The lights are controlled by central panels, the pressing of a button on which removes the necessity to walk three yards. In every room are 'call butler' panels. The butler said that if I did not feel like pressing the button, he would come and press it for me, effectively calling himself.
I know that at the end of three months I shall be disabled, fit for nothing and embarked on a non-career of lifelong penury. Oh, the puppetry of the penurious. My local shop is now Harvey Nichols. It should not be anyone's local shop unless that person is an Arab. But what a vindication of Tony Blair! J suppose you know it's really Cool Britannia when a jar of spaghetti sauce costs £11.50 and they ask you for .E40 for bubble-bath.
I shall have to subsist on what the butler brings me. He arrives every day with a gargantuan arrangement of chocolates for my rooms. I shall soon put on the six pounds I have lost. This naturally will cause yet more stress.
I recently concluded that I suffer from something called hypersomnia which involves not sleeping at night but falling asleep during the day. So I telephoned a clinic in Harley Street that claimed to be able to treat this. A man answered and said the clinic had closed down until further notice. Why? Apparently, its employees were off with stress because they had failed to conform to some regulations. What a drag. It would have to be a boring old massage then. I reached out my hand for the panel that said 'call butler'.
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