City of danger
Taki
T sat down and calculated that if I had I continued to live in London I would have died about seven years ago. Sixty is not a bad age to drop off, but I'll take 67 and kicking any time. The problem is not London, it's my friends. I've got too many good ones who live here, and who like to trip the light fantastic, as they say. Take, for example, last week. Jasper Guinness reached the seminal age of 50, and gave a party to celebrate his maturity. We sure matured — too much, in fact. Put Jasper, Timmy Hanbury, Harry Worcester, John Somerset, Charlie Glass, Robin Birley and yours truly in a room, and one's life span shortens quicker than you can say Iraq. Add a few sweet young things, and the result is the best time I've had since Robert Maxwell went swimming in the Med 13 years ago.
This was on a Tuesday. The next day, after a lunch to celebrate Jasper's 50-plusone day, it was Annabel Goldsmith's book party. I reviewed her book for the Evening Standard, and, as I wrote in its pages, it was an unconventional review to say the least. I had sworn that I wouldn't touch a drop for the duration of the party. The trouble was that it wasn't a conventional book launch. You know the kind. Cheap white plonk, sweaty, literary types jammed into a crappy room, ugly women talking highbrow gibberish. It was the Ritz, there was champagne, beautiful young women and many buddies. I blame my demise on Lord Tebbit. There he was, always with the wonderful Lady Tebbit in her wheelchair (compliments of the brave IRA), and I just had to have the odd drink to keep him company. We discussed sailing boats and he told me a wonderful story about his son falling off one as he ogled some bikini-clad beauty off St Tropez. After that it was all downhill. Dinner at San Lorenzo with Harry, Timmy and Johnson and a bevy of you know what. Then Tramp, where William Astor was celebrating his birthday, 21st I believe (or was it 18th?), with about 100 beauties to help him forget how disgustingly young he is. When that was over, and it wasn't over any time soon, it was Aspinall's and poker with Zac Goldsmith and other pokeristas until dawn. I hope you see my point. London is very dangerous to my health.
Mind you, I'm seriously thinking of moving back, and to hell with a long life. Better one hour of pleasure than a hundred years of solitude. Not that I'm very solitary in Gstaad. Last Saturday was the Taki Cup, as well as the last night before the Palace closed for the season. The Taki Cup involves going up the Wassengrat, the steepest mountain in Gstaad, on snow shoes, or rackets, against the clock. It is excruciatingly hard on one's heart, lungs, legs, but mostly on one's willpower. As everyone who has ever competed in sport knows, the spirit always quits before the body. My record going up is 61 minutes, this time it was 67. A young German managed it in 43 minutes, which surely is a record. He almost ran straight up. I had to meander, as my heart rate was over 200 for a while. While giving the cup, I recounted how his grandfather had reached Paris in two days back in May 1940, only to be told by an agent that the bulk of the German army was still outside the Belgian border, He hustled back. Everyone believed me.
That evening, although feeling a bit out of sorts, we celebrated yet one more closing of the bar of the Palace. The mother of my children was in St Moritz, so my son and I, plus an assortment of hard workers, enriched the owner in the manner he's gotten very used to (35 Swiss francs for a shot of vodka, 350 Swiss francs for a bottle of champagne, and one thirsty man usually has a couple of bottles of bubbly and, say, ten shots before calling it a night). When Alexandra is in town, she more often than not arrives in curlers (just kidding) at 4 a.m., insults the young virgins I'm entertaining, and drags me back home. Not this time. There's nothing worth celebrating more than freedom, and feeling very free that evening, I managed to overdo it. Never mind, I'll have plenty of rest you know when.
Otherwise, everything is hunky-dory. I'm looking for candidates to share my life on board the new Bushido this summer, and am looking forward to going to the Olympics on my boat with — only this time — five fellow martial artists. They say that Israeli girls go wild when there's a war on, and, when I covered the Yom Kippur war in 1973, what they said turned out to be correct. In Greece, girls go wild when the Olympic Games take place. What is great is that Greek girls think the Olympics are on every day of the year.
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