High life

Coup de grace

Taki

Athens oror once I got it exactly right. Just as I had feared last week, I missed the Worces- ter party in London and bit the dust in the singles in Athens — the latter, mind you, after a night of such debauch it would have shamed even Lord Byron.

Now they say that excuses are a dime a dozen. And they are right, but I've actually never been one for making them. It is one of my rare good points. The night before my quarter-final, however, was the party following the wedding of Atalanta Goulan- dris, so you can guess the rest.

Atalanta's parents and I have been friends for nearly 40 years. In fact, we spent 25 summers together for reasons unknown,

`This is not a pipe.'

but mostly because we liked each other.

(They also had great retsina — home- brewed — plus swimming pool and a chef

people tried to kill for.) When the bride was a little girl I tried to put some very right-wing ideas into her head, but it didn't work. Then a couple of summers ago I decided to chase after her, and that didn't work either. Soon after writing about her

she got engaged, so you can draw your own conclusions (if you need your daughter to get married in a hurry, just send her to my boat and the ensuing Spectator article will take care of the rest).

The bride and groom got married in a very beautiful and romantic church in Filotheir, a Big Olive suburb, among the pines and eucalyptus and 50 yards from where I bit the dust the next day. Then we all retired to the Goulandris house in Kifis- sia, an even choicer northern suburb, where the 100-strong English contingent applied the final solution to the Goulandris wine cellar.

The Brits were mostly lawyers, as the bride is, which gave me ideas of sorts. But I did not give in to temptation, allowing myself just a few anti-English remarks dur- ing my speech, which was the only one allowed by the family. In it I pointed out how English culture derives from the Greek, because while we were building the Parthenon, writing tragedies and practising

selective democracy — not the bullshit of today — they were scratching their furry

parts and eating roots. Thus it was normal that they stole from us such things as ideas, monuments and marbles, 'but at least they did not get our last national treasure, which is Atalanta'.

Even if I say so myself, it wasn't a bad speech. But some foreigners complained, asking if the wedding was taking place for love or in order for Taki to insult the English. This led me to start dancing in a maniacal fashion with the mother of my children, of all people, and drinking as fast as possible in case the Brits finished the whole shebang. The result was that I stayed up all night, probably having had the best time ever, even better than at Emma Williams's wedding, if that's possible. I know the hangover was worse.

What I enjoyed almost as much as the music, dancing and the proximity of my Greek friends was that I could insult English judges at will, knowing that some of the guests would one day be bewigged buffoons themselves. The fact that Mr Jus- tice Hidden (hidden for good from now on) had suggested the jury might find the father who shot that monster Kevin Taylor guilty, gave me plenty of ammunition. If that's a just suggestion to the jury I'm Mother Teresa.

The next day the bad news came in about my friend Nikolai Tolstoy, proving to me once and for all that God had an off day when he invented the profession. My defeat in the singles was just the coup de grace.