DIARY
NICHOLAS COLERIDGE With less than a week to go until the scheduled birth of our first child, I have been getting into the swing by attending a course of antenatal classes. These take place in the unlikely setting of an acupunc- ture centre in Ladbroke Grove, and every Tuesday for the past six weeks we've rolled up with another dozen or so couples to learn about contractions, forceps, epidurals and the birth process itself, which is dem- onstrated with the aid of a wooden puppet and a pelvic bone that looks like a dead sheep's skull. Each week the women at the class become larger and larger until eventu- ally, like generals in Saddam Hussein's army, they fail to reappear, having been taken away in the night. Some of the ques- tions that are asked are so astonishingly naïve that you wonder how these mothers got themselves pregnant in the first place: `Will my baby be born in its clothes?' was a good one last week. Of course, one longed to reply, all newborn babies emerge in smocking and bootees. Otherwise their concerns are depressingly worldly: 'Does the Portland Clinic charge corkage on champagne if I'm sent some as a congratu- lations present?'
Most useful on the antenatal front has been the sensible advice of our motherly old midwife: 'Before you go into hospital, mums,' she said, cheerfully rolling back the frontiers of feminism by about 40 years, `don't forget to fill up your deep-freezes at home with sandwiches for your poor hun- gry husbands to eat while you're giving birth.'
Sonia Sinclair gave one of her star-span- gled parties last week, but I can never enter the famous first-floor drawing room of her house in Tite Street without a faint feeling of shiftiness. This is because ten years ago, in an incident I can only now admit to, I played an unwitting part in making her gatherings rather notorious. I was 24 and in those days wrote a weekly column for the Evening Standard. Whenever I delivered my copy to the old offices in Fleet Street, I was intercepted on my way out by the editor of the Londoner's Diary. 'Are you ever intending to feed us a story for the Diary,' he would ask sarcastically, 'or do you only perform under your own byline?' This went on for four years, and however hard I tried to avoid him, I never could. The moral imperative of coming up with a suitable gossip story increased with every visit. One evening, shortly after the showdown at TV- am when Peter Jay, Anna Ford and the rest were ousted by Jonathan Aitken, I was at a party of Sonia Melchett's (as she then was) and witnessed the wine-throwing incident when Ford soaked Aitken's suit. It was obviously amusing to see, but by the time I went into the Evening Standard the next day I'd forgotten all about it. Then, shortly before lunch as I prepared to head off, it came back to me, and I thought I might as well mention it to the Diary since, even if they didn't use it, which seemed highly like- ly as the incident was so trivial, at least I'd have shown willing. The Diary editor's hands, as I casually filled him in, began to shake rather noticeably, his breath became short, and then he sprinted across the office towards the editor's inner sanctum. I meanwhile went out to lunch. Two or three hours later, upon emerging from a restau- rant, I was astonished to see posters on every street corner proclaiming, EXCLUS- IVE: FORD THROWS WINE, and most of page one and the whole of page three of the newspaper devoted to the story. But this was merely a foretaste of what was to fol- low. The next day's nationals contained coverage of Gulf war proportions; not only profiles of both protagonists plus Sonia Melchett, but articles by Oxford philosophy dons on the nature of revenge, doctors on redirecting stress, wine editors on vintages worth throwing, shopping editors on unbreakable glasses, an interview with a Sketchley's stain executive on removing wine from suiting. For several weeks I dared not venture into the office, so 'Spewing or non-spewing?' ambivalent did I feel about my only world exclusive. I need not have worried. When next I saw the Diary editor he hustled me aside and hissed, 'Don't worry, nobody will ever know it was you, I haven't told the edi- tor.' Seeing Anna Ford, glass in hand, at the Sinclairs last week made me thoroughly relieved he was so discreet.
Round to supper came our friends Willie Hamilton-Dalrymple and his pretty fiancée Olivia Fraser, neither of whom we've seen for almost a year, since they've been living in Delhi, where Willie is researching his new book. There was great anticipation, because we were expecting a new-look Dalrymple with a mane of hippie- thick hair instead of the mildly fine sort he had a year ago. Last time we saw them, at their flat in Golf Links, New Delhi, Willie announced he'd discovered an amazing Indian hair restorer, incredibly cheap and effective, that you could buy on prescrip- tion from the local market, Aurobindo Marg. Already, he said, his hair was sprout- ing back, and he strongly recommended that I too pay a visit to Dr Raj Kubar, the distinguished Indian trichologist. Securing an appointment for that very evening, we set off by auto-rickshaw through Delhi's rush-hour, eventually arriving at Dr Kubar's surgery, which, it turned out, was situated above an arcade of stalls selling water melons and bunches of fresh corian- der. Dr Kubar himself not only had an impressively full head of hair for a man in his mid-fifties, but also hairy hands; both encouraging signs. 'The medication I am subscribing,' said Kubar, 'is a by-product of the Nasa space programme actually. But it is being manufactured here in India where we have no patent laws, enabling us to sell it for 60 rupees (about £3) instead of the $300 a bottle in America.' The potion is called Mintop, a green and sticky Minoxidil solution, so horribly stinky that I was swiftly forbidden by my wife from putting it on. Dalrymple, however, persevered, so I was understandably curious (and prepared to be envious) about any transformation. When the doorbell rang, however, blessed relief: the same Dalrymple hairline stand- ing on the step. 'It did as a matter of fact work surprisingly well,' he insists defensive- ly. 'My hair came forward a whole inch. But there were side effects': raised blood pres- sure, a painfully expanded brain, hallucina- tions and bouts of dizziness and nausea that removed all capacity for concentration. Even worse, for somebody whose job necessitated a lot of flying, Willie reported that Mintop responds badly to cabin pres- sure and slowly seeps into your handbag- gage, which is why all Indian Airways flights reek of the stuff.
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