High life
Good news and the bad
Taki
New York The good news is that for the second straight time I ran into a gentleman while flying Concorde. On the Bagel to London trip it was Lord Hanson, a man I've known for more than 30 years and one who has always stuck by me, especially while I was in the pokey, and on the return trip, Bill Blass, as nice a man as one hopes to find, a prince among fashion designers.
Mind you, I'm not happy because that clever Lord King, or whoever decides these matters, has not put at least 50 copies of the Speccy on board each aircraft. The only copy available on the Lord Hanson run was his own, while on the Blass trip I had to lend Bill mine as his goes to his Connecticut address. I find this out- rageous.
I will not say how much it costs to fly the fast bird because it will give inland revenue creeps ideas, but having paid up, one expects to get the best, and not some cheap Conde Nast glitz full of ads about phoney eyelashes. Either BA stock their planes with The Spectator, or they lose Taki's moolah, which is quite considerable when you think I've crossed the ocean nine times round trip since my daddy died. (Far more expensive that 1,000.copies of The Specta- tor, that's for sure).
Now for the bad news. The Venerable Diodoros the First, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, was a friend of my father's, had often dined at our house, and had even tried to convert both daddy and me from our womanising ways. (Alas, even men of God are known to fail). After father's death Diodoros happened to be in the Big Olive and stopped by to pay a visit to yours truly. I felt truly honoured. He is a very simple man, as well as very intelligent, and he told me that, as a young theology student, he had spent time in London selling papers to make ends meet (unlike Anglican bishops, who want to give other people's money away while they live in luxury, Diodoros lives a frugal existence).
This is why I was outraged last week to read that Diodoros had been tear-gassed and knocked down in the holiest week and in the holiest of cities by Israeli paramilit- ary police. And before the Jewish lobby floods the Post Office with anti-Taki letters to the new sainted editor, let me add that it was not official Israeli policy to allow Jewish settlers to occupy the St John's hospice, but theirs is the responsibility to keep those extremists out. Especially dur- ing Holy Week, and on the site of the Via Dolorosa. One of them played a honky tonk piano, which is a provocation to say the least, and then the slob arrived to stir things up even more. Ariel Sharon has given gluttony a bad name, so I wasn't surprised to find him among extremists, but the Israeli riot police should have clubbed him, not the Greek Orthodox followers.
Needless to say, Easter was a quiet time for me, spent among children and friends in the country outside the Big Bagel, thank God. I overdid things on my last night in London and have had a slight temperature and a heavy cold ever since. Perhaps this is Why this column is so mean-spirited. But I Might as well get everything off my chest. While lying around the house I read Nicholas (longpockets) Garland's book, Not Many Dead. Thank god this man is a cartoonist and not a doctor, fireman, policeman, or platoon leader. It took him the better part of a year to make up his mind about the simplest of things - changing jobs — and then he spent the rest agonising over it. (How'd you like to go over the wire for Nick Garland under intense fire, and then have him change his mind?) For a while I enjoyed the opus, but then all the vacillation and those snide asides about colleagues got on my nerves. In fact I skipped a lot of it. I'm afraid my style is different to Garland's. Better to plunge the knife in cleanly, and up front, rather than nibble away piranha-like for 200 pages. But I guess his is the English way.
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