High life
Am I pregnant?
Taki
Gstaad The month of February is compulsive party time in this beautiful Alpine village. There are more grand dinners given nightly by the Gstaad elite than there are banks in good old Helvetia, which means it is also enlarged liver time. Two days ago, I woke up early to go helicopter skiing and for the first time realised what it's like to be a woman. I felt totally pregnant. My liver obviously needed lebensraum and was heav- ily leaning on its neighbours.
Trying not to drink in Gstaad during the height of the season is like trying to like Hillary and Bill Clinton. Almost impossible. First of all because of the food and wine people serve. Not exactly Chinese takeout. Trailer-park trash like the Clintons are known to wash down their revolting ham- burgers with Diet Cokes, but here in Gstaad Mouton Rothschild and good cigars are de rigueur. Excellent wine makes one drink more and more, not, like some fools insist, the other way round. It is very simple. After a while one feels a terrific euphoria, and, looking for more, one switches to whiskey or'vodka. That is when people who do not suffer fools gladly usually leave the It's a postcard from Milford Haven.' room in a hurry. The past two weeks I've emptied more elegant drawing-rooms than the Princess of Wails has baseball caps.
The visit of the Greek royal family did not help. First Aleco then Dino Goulandris gave terrific dinners for them, and the Goulandrises are not exactly known for serving cheap dago plonk and pizza. Gstaad's finest, like the Romanoffs and Wittgensteins came out in force. Even the poor little Greek boy, accompanied by the mother of his children, was included. No sooner had Vivien Duffield and the newly knighted Jocelyn Stevens arrived — with a brigade of house guests such as Sir Rocco and wife, Lords Astor and Donaghue, with wife and best girl, Philip Harari and John Nutting, with wives — it was grand dinner time once again. It was the next morning that I felt pregnant.
I imagine the only person not drinking in Gstaad is Barry Humphries, who is here with his wife Lizzie, but the greatest of all Aussies has been practising non-drinking in Gstaad for years. I dined with Barry at a friend's house, and was seated next to a charming Chinese lady. William Buckley was asking her all sorts of questions about China and she seemed to have all the answers. She would, wouldn't she! It turned out the charming Chinese lady was Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans, probably the best book to come out of that overcrowded land. Like a fool, I talked to her about Japanese samurai, having halfway through the dinner become euphoric.
Real, not alcohol induced, euphoria finally came last week during the Eagle Club's ski races. My 15-year-old son, JT, has suffered from dyslexia and asthma all his life. But on that day he went down like a hero, attacking the gates early yet looking as elegant as Jean Claude Killy. Maybe a bit too elegant, I thought. A couple of pros who were watching announced he was the fastest, he just made it look effortless. Sure enough they were right. The next day he got up to receive the silver cup his old man had once won by a fluke 31 years ago.
I find it very hard to write about JT and not sound horribly corny, but I have never felt so happy as I did that day. He is abso- lutely fearless on the slopes, taking every- thing straight, always looking for speed. And he's as sweet-natured as he's elegant on skis. He was extremely embarrassed when I went around bragging to everyone about his victory.
One who never brags is Gina Sopwith, of Sopwith Camel fame, who as Gina Hawthorn missed the bronze slalom medal in the 1968 Grenoble Olympics by two tenths of a second. This is by miles the best result any Brit has ever achieved in skiing, and as I write this Gina, Vivien Duffield, Ines Schwarzenbach and I are off in a heli- copter for some deep powder runs, preg- nancy or no pregnancy.
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