DIARY
Few people in England can be more got at by amateur travel writers than I am in my capacity as editor of Harpers & Queen. Fortunately we have a distinguished travel editor in Mr John Hatt, in whose direction I deflect most travel suggestions, but Hatt has been in Kenya for the last month, investigating the taste of raw zebra, and in his absence I have been bombarded. There is a particular kind of Englishwoman who writes travel articles. Socially smart, and generally rather rich, she seizes upon travel writing as a means of contributing to glossy magazines. without the stigma of being a `journalist'. 'Dear Sir', she writes, 'I have recently returned from China where we spent six days in Peking and Xian. I have kept a full journal of our travels (including dinner at the embassy) and have also taken some excellent coloured photographs of the terracotta warriors. I am in London next Thursday and, unless I hear from you beforehand, shall deliver the article to your office sometime in the afternoon. P.S. I do expect to be properly paid!' Few of these articles are good enough to publish, but they are an interesting barometer of travel trends. Two years ago we were offered articles only about Russia and Rajasthan. Currently it is Tibet and Cuba. I have visited neither Lhasa nor Havana, but imagine their hotel lobbies crowded with social travel writers and their merchant banking husbands, all struck with the identical brainwave of writing their experi- ences for Harpers & Queen. At least, until recently, these women did not suggest being paid much in the way of expenses for their articles. Lately, however, a greedy new note has crept into discussions. A fortnight ago I had arrived early in my office and took a telephone call from North Africa. The line was very faint, but I could just make out a girl's voice proposing an article about a luxury hotel. She was staying there, it emerged, on her honey- moon. 'I don't want to commission this on the telephone,' I said. 'Why don't you come and talk to us when you get home, and perhaps we can do something?' That won't do at all,' she replied petulantly, 'I need to know now, so I can fix up a discount on our room.'
Arather mysterious thing about the great City crash is this: whatever has become of the public school stockbrokers and analysts who used to appear on televi- sion every night? Before Black Monday, you couldn't turn on the Channel 4 News or the City Programme without seeing a droll pinstriped broker broadcasting live from his screens, informing you about the latest rise in the market. Many of these boys were contemporaries of mine from NICHOLAS COLERIDGE
school or university, where they were vaguely contemptuous of the media, until they developed a taste for appearing on it. Since the crash, however, they have vamoosed. In 20 hours of financial televi- sion I haven't seen a single Establishment face explaining what is going on. Instead the dealing room broadcasts are fronted only by Eastenders and spivs, looking increasingly ill-at-ease under fire. The officer class used to be first over the top when the going got tough. The modern public school broker is apparently present- able at a dance, but invisible in a ship- wreck.
There were certainly plenty of present- able stockbroker friends about at an amus- ing wedding in Kent this weekend. None looked too downcast, wearing ever jazzier ties with their morning dress. Most were taking 'the long view', which means they haven't got a clue what's happening so they might as well do nothing much for a long time. They were in any case more in- terested in the no-show of the Princess of Wales at the church. Even people who ordinarily have no interest in royal domes- ticity have been gripped by the current crisis. Perhaps, like the Stock Exchange slide, we shouldn't view it as a crisis at all, but a simple 'correction' in the market to ease the grossly inflated index in royal slush. After seven years of spiralling non- sense about the fairytale marriage, the bubble has burst, and all over the world journalists are shouting 'Sell, sell, sell!' In his leader in last week's Sunday Telegraph, Peregrine Worsthorne laid much of the blame for the slide on the royal family's decision in the mid-Seventies to popularise their image, and move away from the 'It's about the manship.' contest for the Tory chair- majesty of monarchy. He is right,but this does not explain why they are miserable. Royal walkabouts are aimed at the work- ing class and rarely at people in the social classes just below their own. I find it extraordinary at wedding receptions of old family friends that the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales prefer to huddle in a special separate drawing room, where they talk stiffly to each other as though at a gruesome family Christmas, instead of mingling with the other guests in the marquee. The only royal who slipped out was the Duchess of York, who kept making noisy sorties from the enclosure, and falling on her friends with whoops of delight. Unless they are to remain isolated and paranoid, the royal family should perhaps ease the majesty of monarchy among their jollier contemporaries too.
To Oxford where I have been invited to address the university Law Society on the subject of libel, about which I know next to nothing. My hosts at dinner beforehand at La Sorbonne are a beautiful Chinese girl from Hong Kong, a chic Singapore stu- dent, a rich Iraqi with a highpitched giggle, and a studious Bangladeshi boy whose father owns a tandoori restaurant in South Kensington. As dinner progresses it be- comes clear that only one of them is reading law, and the others are as ignorant as I. As we leave the restaurant to walk to University College, where the meeting is taking place, I notice the party beginning to straggle. Then, as we cross Univ quad, the Bangladeshi dives towards a staircase and disappears into the fog. 'Aren't you coming to the meeting?' we call out to him. 'Unfortunately not,' he calls back. 'I have been asked to a Japanese tea ceremony, it sounds more fun.'
Iwas asked to a dinner in the Raphael cartoon room of the Victoria & Albert Museum by the Ferragamo family. Several hundred people had been invited to mark the opening of an exhibition of their famous shoes, which Sir Harold Acton, in a lyrical speech, praised for their contribu- tion to the art of lovemaking. At dinner I was placed next to a highly intelligent businesswoman who happens to be an
amateur mind-reader as a sideline. This makes conversation a bit redundant. No sooner have you thought of something to say than she knows it already. By the time you actually speak you are repeating your-
self. 'You're quite right,' she kept saying before I'd said a word. Or, more usually, `You're nearly right, you know. You're nearly right about that.'
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