19 May 2012

Low life

Listening to the BBC news and current affairs programmes, you’d think that Britain is a socialist republic. Which is odd because my entire extended family, on both my mother’s side (smallholders) and on my father’s (urban lower-middle class), is without exception monarchist conservative. From time to time there are rumours that somebody or other has cast their vote for the LibDems, or is thinking about doing so, but we laugh and put this down to an excess of sublimated sexuality rather than political conviction.

We have a short branch of the family which is staunch Hitlerite Nazi, but no...

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High life

Miami Beach
I thought it a good time to visit, neither spring break debauchery nor fashionista pretence time. So I signed up yet again for the judo championships, trained very hard and flew down with four buddies hoping to stay in a family hotel near the water, a bit like Bogie stopping at a place in Key Largo and running into Johnny Rocco, a crime tsar grown old and bitter and played by Edward G. Robinson. In that wonderful golden oldie, Claire Trevor played Rocco’s alcoholic mistress and portrayed the hooker as a sympathetic victim. (She also won...

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12 May 2012

Low life

The day after her 96th birthday, and three days before she died, my next-door neighbour told me she wanted Jimmy killed and put in her coffin with her. She knew then she hadn’t long to go. The only thing I could do for her, she said, was put fresh milk in Jimmy’s saucer, making sure that the milk was fresh. She was very anxious about this. She’d hate Jimmy to be offered milk that had gone off.

I was jubilant. Her wanting Jimmy put down was the best news I’d heard for ages. I’d have offered to do it...

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High life

New York
So, Sarko and Bruni are out, Hollande is in and I’m off to the Actor’s Studio to brush up on my acting lessons. (Stanley Kowalski is reborn. Stella!) I wonder whether DSK is thinking: ‘There but for an African maid go I.’ My friend Edward Jay Epstein has written a quickie book about Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s little problem of last year here in the Bagel, one in which Epstein reiterates the disgraced ex-IMF chief’s suspicions that he was set up by his political enemies. Epstein does not agree, he simply states Dominique’s case.

Personally, I was delighted...

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5 May 2012

High life

New York
I have settled into my Bagel routine as if I had never been away: up early, a 25-minute walk through the park, one hour of judo working with three opponents, walk back, have breakfast and collapse with the newspapers. In the evening it is karate with Richard Amos and a couple of other black belts, then dinner at home. Three times per week I go out and get hammered in case I get too healthy, more often than not with Michael Mailer in the Boom Boom room, André Balazs’s downtown extravaganza. The women are mostly young,...

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Low life

I arrived at the hilltop crematorium an hour early. The car park was empty and there wasn’t a soul about. Behind the low crematorium building the sky was black and threatening. I found the door to the gents’ lavatory to be unlocked, however, and the water in the tap above the hand basin unexpectedly hot. I used the facilities and as I washed my hands I leaned forward and stared at my face in the mirror.

I’d been to a party the night before. It was one of those depressing parties where the illegal drugs are taken secretly by...

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