High life
Indomitable and proud
Taki
ICoronis t seems like yesterday when I was last in this private island paradise off the Peloponnesian coast one year ago. My how time flies when one's having fun. 2001 has been a wonderful year for the poor little Greek boy. Last year here in Coronis I nearly emptied my hosts' cellars of Château Latour trying to get over the guilt of a broken love affair. This year I have managed to empty them celebrating the ending of yet another due to family responsibilities. It is a strange thing.
The older I get and the more booze I consume, the more girls I find willing to share my dissolute lifestyle. Mind you, I know what you're thinking, but it's not the case. As far as I know it has nothing to do with moolah. One of my weaknesses is the inability to fall in love with cheap women. I used to go with hookers all the time but — unless something fantastic comes along — I actually stopped using them about 15 years ago. No, jeunes files de bonne famille are the only ones that race my motor, because of their grace and shyness, a prerequisite where the heart is concerned.
The trouble, of course, is that once the objective has been reached all sorts of complications arise. I am not the type to permanently trade-in the old model for a new one, especially at my age, so the new models get weepy at times and have even been known to throw things, (My kids, too, have been known to throw the odd drink towards the new models.) With such a complicated love life, no wonder I drink as much as I do. But back to Coronis. My host is a childhood friend whose wife — a modern Penelope — runs the most impeccable household anywhere and, believe you me. I've been round to some of the best. In fact, if all the super-rich were like my hosts — extremely kind to everyone, providing employment to thousands — I'd be even more right-wing than I already am. This week our house party consisted of Galen and Hilary Weston, Sir Mark and Lady Weinberg, the great designer Carolina Herrera and her hubby, Reinaldo, Sir Rocco and Lady Forte and their beautiful three children, the mother of mine, Duncan McLaren and the poor little Greek boy. Who every day played tennis with a very good player who since this week is known as the poor little Canadian boy — Galen Weston, whose company bought out Best Foods, making the Westons the biggest bakery owners in the world.
Needless to say, it's been a magical week, All my very close friends since childhood are around, Professor Yohanes Goulandris, Aleko Goulandris — whose new house in Porto Heli was once the setting for the great libel case lost by The Spectator and myself in 1986 — and younger friends like George and Arietta Vardinoyannis, Spyro Niarchos and Elizabeth Stauffenberg, niece of the hero officer who put the bomb under Hitler. We've been sitting up night after night reminiscing about school — everyone of my age group went to the same Greek Eton, Makri — and girls we were once in love with.
There is something very nostalgic about Greece, especially to someone like myself who lives abroad. I walked around Kolonaki square, where I was born and spent the war years, which features the 1930s Bauhaus-influenced apartment blocks interspersed with the odd neo-classical private houses and the more solid structures of the 1950s. Back in those halcyon days, function did not outrank form, and some of the best Mediterranean architecture can be seen here. The vast sweep of Athenian history is everywhere. Forty-two kilometres away is where we Athenians beat the bejesus out of the Persians in 490 BC, saving Western civilisation, Just past the great scimitar-curved Phaliron Bay lies Salamis, where yet again Themistocles trapped the vast Persian fleet and sent Xerxes back to towel-land empty-handed. Much closer to my home are Theision and Makriyanni, where heroic Athenian police officers laid down their lives in order to save us from communist guerrillas and certain death. And at 45 Patriarchou loakim street, the house where I was born, the unknown Red Beret tommy who was killed by a sniper and fell dead into our kitchen in December 1944. I think of all these people and events, of my grandfather and father, my childhood friends and of my past life, and most of it had to do with this wonderful city of Athens, now ugly and pockmarked by modernists, but always indomitable and proud.
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