Spectator peregrinations

It must be a comment on the state of this nation that Inter-Continental Hotels, owned by Pan Am, last week opened a branch at Hyde Park Corner. Inter-Continental Hotels were originally devised, on the suggestion of President Roosevelt to the president of Pan Am, as a way of opening up the developing countries of South America after the war. There was nowhere for the enterprising American basinessman to stay, unless he took his own drinking water, without getting hepatitis or some other expensively incapacitating ailment. Certainly this is still true of the only other Inter-Continental 1 have visited — in Rawalpindi. For the average American visitor, to venture out of the Inter-Continental, except in an air-conditioned taxi to and from the airport, would be a sentence of death.

Happily I can report that when I went to the opening of London's Inter-Continental, by the Dukt. c Wellington who lives across the road at Apsley House, I did not touch the water. Indeed it has become a sort of game with me, as I don't get paid much for writing this stuff, to see how much money I can eat and drink my way through. My estimate on this occasion, and I wasn't particularly greedy, about £85. Caviar, pate, vodka and champagne before the lunch even started. There were also some remarkable sculptures in ice, one of them of Queen Boadicea and her chariot which were dripping away, gradually losing arms, shields and other weapons thoughout lunch. I was told that the Inter-Contintal has a Japanese sculptor,

forever carving away in sub-zero temperatures in the basement. In the best tradition of American imperialism, they didn't even ask him to lunch. Or would he find that too depressing? On the question of Japanese waiters, I did hear Kenneth Rose talking to the Duke of Wellington (incidentally I thought it was very good of the Duke to open the hotel — how would you like to have hundreds of American tourists peering over your garden wall?). Rose's loud, high-pitched voice was saying, "I write a column in the Sunday Telegraph, you know, but of course that's only my bread and butter. What I'm really interested in is political biographies." I think he wanted the Duke to give him a job. At this point I had to stop eavesdropping and get a thin piece of brown bread and butter to go with my caviar.

Riding high

The sherry must have gone to their heads. Returning from Seville after their tour of bodegas in Jerez, two members of the Sunday Times Wine Club became members of the much more exclusive Sex-above-30,000ft club. Not in itself worthy of a mention on the front of Lord Thomson's eminent organ. But what is more surprising is that they did it again on the train between Gatwick and Croydon. Is this a record? Michael Parkinson tells me, by way of explaining his life-long interest in films, that he was conceived in the back row of a cinema. I never cease to be surprised by the disgusting behaviour of former generations who put us where we are today.

Small talk

Cause for you to regret that I don't do photographs in this column: I have just won a photographic competition. As I mentioned a few weeks ago Rollei arranged for some well-chosen Grub Street practitioners to try out their 'ultra-miniature' camera. Now I have been sent one of these £120 match-box size devices as a prize. I am not in the habit of winning competitions — least of all photographic ones — so I can guess only that the camera, with its 'electronic brain', is a lot more intelligent than I am.

Pelican prices

The Editor's secretary has been having a little trouble over a croissant she bought in the rather ordinary Pelican Coffee Shop in Park Lane. It cost her 40p, and with coffee and VAT, '76p. The thing is, she found when she wrote to the management, that the Pelican Coffee Shop is owned by the much grander Londonderry Hotel. "I would like to point out," says the Londonderry, "that we have a lot of Royalty from all over the world who pay us anything from E40 to £100 per night and always leave our hotel entirely satisfied." Fine. But whatever they may have been satisfied by, do these royal visitors come from all over the world to go to the Pelican Coffee Shop or to eat croissants while walking down Park Lane? If not, I'm sure it wouldn't hurt them to subsidise someone who does.

Old-timers

If 'you think birthdays are painful, spare a thought for disc-jockeys. I found a collection of ageing disc-jockeys the other day at the Curzon House Club eating lobsters as if nothing had ever happened to the economy and celebrating the fiftieth year of Pete Murray — which happens to coincide with his quartercentury at the BBC. Mr Murray is about as young and about as trendy as his namesake, Len Murray. But the worst shock on that occasion was for Marjorie Proops of the Daily Mirror. When she said to Tim Satchel], presently editing 'Town Talk' in the Sunday Express, that they had once hashed up a story about her, he said that must have been in the days of Castlerosse. Castlerosse was writing before the war. Satchell sent her a red rose next morning which she said was the nicest thing to have happened to her for seventy-five years. Marjorie Proops is sixty-five and has just written a book called Pride Prejudice and Proops.

Dog day

Ever neighbourly I have been taking a keen interest in the people who have come to inspect the house that is up for sale a few doors along from me in Vincent Square. If I don't like the look of them I tell them about the trouble I've had with dry rot. If I do, I talk about sitting on the balcony in the summer watching the cricket. A recent visitor was Nick Scott, the admirable former Tory Housing Minister and MP for Chelsea, who actually plays cricket, for the combined Houses of Parliament, in Vincent Square and who could certainly do with a house in the Westiminster division bell area. He was walking his dog, an old grey-whiskered black Labrador, when I suggested the idea. Alas, while we were talking, the old dog attacked the Golden Retriever which belongs to the bishop next door and Scott had to dive into the savage melee to separate the brutes. The last I saw of him he had produced a chain from his pocket and was dragging his snarling animal along the pavement. All my diplomacy gone to the dogs.

Pioneers

At a party to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Film Society movement last week I was reminded that The Spectator was the first paper to employ a film critic. Iris Barry was the first person to write about films as an art form in this country. I was also reminded of the vagaries of historical interest which determine what ought to be preserved. A lot more people are interested in books on fashions or lacemaking in eighteenth-century Holland than in the more pompous political or theological dissertations that have emanated from that country. Will future generations be more concerned about obscure documentaries on neckties or commuting habits than on the epic films of our time? Is this why I have just had a telephone call from Jack Pizzey, a BBC Man Alive reporter, wanting me to tell him about the life-styles of merchant bankers? Someone else has written for my opinions on Canaletto's clouds.

Peregrine