Diary
If diaries are all about name-dropping and indiscretion, and they usually are, perhaps I should say that I had lunch on Tuesday with the Prime Minister at No. 10. This is the sort of thing that no diarist could bear to suppress. On the other hand, the unwritten rules of journalism dictate that I can't say anything about it. So does my editor at the Sunday Times. What a miserable dilemma. And in the very week when The Spectator asked me to write this diary. I suppose I can at least reveal that we had lamb stew followed by fruit salad; both were simple but good. Presumably the purpose of such meetings, among other things, is to subject us journalists to the Prime Minister's formidable charm. This is the way the British establishment has traditionally succeeded in unmanning, or unwomanning, the awkward squad; it is also difficult to resist the seduction of smart invitations and the hope of more. It's almost as bad as the corruption of friendship.
I do feel slightly unwomanned, just for the moment, but, like the woman in the song, I will survive.
My other excitement of the week was a local Notting Hill charity quiz dinner for Response International, which helps with medicine and mine-clearing in places like Angola and Chechnya, in the aftermath of war, 'after the cameras have left'. First prize was the Howitzer Cup, actually a 25mm mortar presented by a brave woman volunteer, who is a colonel in the Territorial Army. Large amounts of shepherd's pie were cooked by other women volunteers - all very English, somehow. I am pleased and proud to say our table won, beating the powerful Sebastian Faulks team, mainly because we had an unknown champion in David Neuberger, old friend, polymath and judge. Feelings run very high in these charity quizzes, and I am afraid contestants are not always very sporting. After all, one's intellectual prowess is at stake. One year at the River Cafe quiz, an event always studded with stars of the left-liberal intelligentsia, it quickly emerged, after the first few rounds, that an all-male team was winning easily. To our amazement an angry cry rose up from the assembled New Labour luvvies. 'Cheating, cheating!' they shouted.
'It's not fair! They haven't got any women.'
I often think there is something very unfair and cheating about obituaries, which I read keenly every week. I know it's very aging to be interested in obituaries; I wish I weren't. I still have a schoolboy son at home, so I like to think that youth has not yet quite fled the house, but the truth is that, as time has worn on, obituaries have begun to interest me more than announcements of births and marriages. The end of the story is so very much more fascinating than the beginning, especially with famous people. But the trouble is that obituarists so often seem to get things wrong. Usually they're much too nice and uncritical - de mortuis nil nisi bonum. But how absurd. The only sensible time to kick a man is when he's not only down but dead. The obituarists were grovellingly, sickeningly nice about Roy Jenkins and Alan Clark, two of the nastiest men I ever met. It made me furious. Even journalists felt obliged to suck up to them post-mortem with laddish anecdotes and lunchtime reminiscences.
Well, as the saying goes, if you haven't got anything nice to say, say it now.
Et in Arcadia ego; I, too, once had lunch with that Roy Jenkins, at a glittering party in a private house. My delight at being placed next to the great man was soon crushed by the experience. He was so insufferably pompous and patronising that if we had been in a restaurant I would have walked out. Our conversation turned to the discrimination against private-school children at some Oxford and Cambridge colleges - now universally acknowledged and even recommended by our government. 'It doesn't happen, ' he told me flatly. I told him, politely I think, that I was convinced, both by talking to dons and by many individual accounts, that it did. 'Nonsense, ' he said, really rudely. I persisted, whereupon he said, with magisterial disdain, 'You do REALISE I am CHANCELLOR of Oxford University? I know all about it. I can't help it if some of your friends' children didn't get into Oxford; they probably weren't as clever as they thought they were.' Vulgar, condescending ignorance! Later I worked out which character of fiction he reminded me of: it was Lady Catherine De Bourgh.
I wonder what my patron saint Jane Austen would have made of my encounter with Alan Clark. I met him at a political party in a private house not so long ago, for dinner and serious discussion. My motto has always been that any attention is better than none, so I didn't mind, at first, that he started flirting, though, since I was not an admirer, I did not flirt back. His style was certainly distinctive.
After the usual overtures, he told me, staring into my face, that my eyes were absolutely dazzling, mesmerising. Then he said he couldn't work out whether that was because my eyes are too close together or whether it was because I have a squint. Despite this handicap, he pressed me more and more persistently to have dinner with him. I refused, very clearly, ever to have dinner or anything else with him. But he meant then and there.
To leave the party at once. Apparently he thought saying no is a form of flirting; he pressed and pressed me, literally, as we queued to go into our hosts' dining-room.
When at last he came to believe I was impervious to his charms, and would not rush off with him into the night, he turned to me with a peculiarly vicious look. And this is what this self-styled gentleman, this ladies' man, this intellectual, this flower of our civilisation then said: 'Well, fuck you, then. Fuck off. I'm not talking to you any more.' And he didn't, I'm glad to say.
In thinking about death and the dead, I find the tough and truthful approach much more comforting than conventional pleasantries. I particularly loved the lines the artist Lincoln Seligman included on the service sheet at the memorial service of his father, Madron Seligman: 'We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know.'
Saturday, February 15, 2003 | Comments (0)
Diary
Suspended high above the snow in the Swiss Alps, on a ski-lift that had mysteriously stopped, I was reminded of that famous phrase in a Times editorial of long ago - 'picnicking on Vesuvius'. I can't remember what the Thunderer was holding forth about, exactly. It might have been the awfulness of having Mick Jagger in our midst, or it might have been the IMF inspectors, but the general drift was the end of civilisation as we know it. Perhaps it was the mountains that made me think of it, although as far as I know the Alps are not likely to burst into flame. On the other hand, the snow was melting, very visibly, and unseasonally, as I sat swinging in the intense heat, with scary ultra-something rays burning through my Factor 30 Ecran Total. Each year there is less and less snow, and this probably is the beginning of the end of skiing in the Alps.
What really made me have apocalyptic thoughts, though, was the CNN news every morning. We watched it, miserably, on television each day, before setting out, and for the first time I felt that the extraordinary peace and solitude of the mountains - this is term time, so no shrieking snowboarders - are under threat. Or rather, that this entire way of life, with its feeling of peace and security, its confidence and commerce, is an illusion - it is picnicking on Vesuvius.
It's true that my anxiety may have been heightened by the experience of dangling alone for several minutes at several thousand feet, without a soul in earshot. But there can be very few people who don't feel the same, at moments, every day. Fortunately, these moments are rare; human nature seems to be so organised that the far-off sorrows of the world do not often interfere with the pleasures of large amounts of foie gras or some serious shopping. And there was a great deal of luxe and calme in the smartish resort where I was staying, if not exactly of volupte - it is soothingly middle-aged, I'm glad to say. It has almost no celebs either, which was nice.
The best (or worst) they can do is Roger Moore, who has a chalet there, and if he doesn't exactly raise the tone, he can hardly be said to lower it much either, which is more than you can usually say of the British in ski resorts. Fortunately, they hardly have any brutish British where I was staying; I hardly heard any English at all.
I can never decide why it is that the Europeans are so smart and well-behaved compared with the British. And so confident, apparently. While the British, even the very rich, go around looking as if they had little money and less taste, the French, the Italians, the Germans and the Swiss look as if they owe it to themselves to look kempt and expensive - what the great boutiquier Joseph Ettedgui once described to me in an interview as 'very Madame'. Or very Monsieur, of course. They seem to love it. In the little resort where I've often stayed, they go about in fiendishly expensive designer fur, with elegant, brand-new shoes and colour co-ordinated clothes that appear to have come straight from the drycleaner. This isn't true of everyone, of course. There are some, and I suspect they may be the socially smarter ones, who dress more quietly. But even those who go in for casual chic still wear supple, immaculate suede jeans, serious jewellery and impeccable boots 'cowboy' behind the wheels of radiantly shiny Lexus four-wheel drives.
You can see at a glance that they're not of the Anglo-Saxon persuasion.
To someone coming from Britain the obsessive cleanliness is a bit of a shock. The town itself is dazzlingly neat and hygienic - not a piece of litter or chewing-gum in sight, and every shop and restaurant spotless. Every lobby, every lavatory smells strongly of concentrated 'Flowers of the Alps' or 'Matterhorn Mist'. Meanwhile, an English newspaper that I bought announced that London is now filthier than Dakar. Oddly enough, my close friend and next-door neighbour, who is German, says that's what she loves about Britain, and especially London - all the filth and disorder. It's Ordnung of every kind she and her husband fled from; she finds it horribly repressive. She believes that the price of freedom, up to a point, is a little filth; our local public pool may be quite foul, but at least you can dive in without a regulation rubber hat. The waves of rubble in the Portobello Road and the rancid smells of street food are a constant, life-enhancing delight to her.
This opinion had always seemed completely daft to me, until these few days in Switzerland. There is perhaps something repressive about all that tidying away of all life's dark and dirty debris; it's a kind of pretence that it doesn't exist. And leading such a squeakyclean life is a kind of picnicking not on Vesuvius but on a hidden rubbish dump.
Some French friends of my skiing friends invited me to an informal supper, which I enjoyed very much. I loved hearing their fulminations against their short working week, and how impossible it is to run a farm with no flexibility at harvest time. They hate all the Brussels red tape and corruption, too, not to mention French corruption, and they hate Jospin. Not all the French are terribly French about the EU. Sadly, though, the evening was ruined for one man, whose mother in France had just been burgled. She and her maid had been tricked by two conmen pretending to be from the gas board or something. There were commiserations all round the table, and finally someone asked whether anything of particular value had been taken. The poor man replied that, apart from things of sentimental value, perhaps the worst was the loss of the collection of - well, I'd better not say which painters, but substitute others of equal standing - Matisse and Magritte. What can one say? I immediately realised, as we used to say at home in schoolboy Franglais, that I was dining rather au dessus de ma gare. The world divides into those who love ridiculous phrases like that, and those who hate them. I'm very fond of them; I think they're part of family solidarity, because they come to have a semi-private meaning. One of my favourites, which my younger brother and I imagined we had invented to cover the many and various kinds of panic associated with travel, is folie de gare - train fever. Others are from the diplomatic or army past; there is HdeC for hors de combat; it means something slightly crueller than out of the running; my mother, whose judgments were strict, used to use it with great abandon to mean absolutely useless.
English expressions, in her view, like FHB or PLU were quite unacceptable. Only French or franglais, or at least some sort of foreign language, would do, to dissociate one's English self, no doubt, from anything quite so silly. Vivent les differences.
Saturday, March 23, 2002 | Comments (0)
