Talk about from the ridiculously sublime to the sublimely ridiculous. My fiancée and I have just been staying at the incomparable 13th-century Château de Bagnols near Lyons. Spectacular panoramic views of the Beaujolais countryside; a Michelin-starred restaurant; Olga Polizzi’s taste (our room had a Louis XIII bed); pure perfection in hospitality. Then straight on to Center Parcs in Wiltshire with my children. Of course, I was warned how nargy it was going to be, and several people assumed I was only going there to write a spectacularly snobbish article. I was also pretty suspicious about a place that couldn’t spell its own name properly, in either the adjective or the noun. In the end it was perfectly bearable, I suppose, and my insufficiently class-conscious children adored every moment, needless to say. The weird thing was that it somehow wound up costing as much as Bagnols.
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I had ample opportunity to make a study of tattoos while at Center Parcs, and have concluded that whereas the older Briton sports traditional representations of anchors, regimental mottos — for some reason the Royal Artillery’s ‘Ubique’ was, well, ubique — and loved ones’ names, the younger generation tend to have unintelligible New Agey-style scribbles that often look like the logos for triads. I blame Beckham.
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I woke up last week with a wasp between my toes, which stung me. I expected it to hurt horribly, but surprisingly it didn’t at all. Do we have an exaggerated fear of being stung because of the memory of it happening in childhood, when it was much more painful? Rather as buildings from our youth seem smaller in later life, wasp stings aren’t so bad now. Or maybe it was just a small wasp.
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A sign of our affluent times that I spotted in Brompton Road this week: a beggar, sitting on the pavement with a cardboard sign saying ‘Please Help’, while chatting on his mobile phone.
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Panorama’s Gavin Esler has taken me to task for saying that ‘The United Kingdom hasn’t yet lost a war’, writing on some blogsite that I can’t be much of an historian, can I, if I hadn’t heard of the American War of Independence. Yet the UK was founded by the Act of Union of 1800, 17 years after the end of the American War. Yah-boo sucks, Mr Esler.
Speaking of which, since the war against al-Qa’eda is obviously going to be a long one, shouldn’t we start beautifying some of the unsightly security apparatus that was put up hurriedly and supposedly temporarily after 9/11? They’re doubtless going to be there for a few decades or so, so oughtn’t the huge concrete blocks outside the Palace of Westminster and the American embassy be covered in ivy, like the Citadel part of the Admiralty on Horse Guards Parade? In no time people will think they were designed by Pugin or Barry. Aesthetics are important in the wider cultural struggle, and there is no reason why al-Qa’eda should impose such concrete ugliness on us, as well as death, destruction and interminable airport queues.
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‘There is one town to see your first bullfight in if you were only going to see one, and that is Ronda,’ writes Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon. Last week I was invited by the Real Maestranza de Caballería de Ronda (The Royal Riding School of Ronda) to watch the Ordóñez matador brothers take part in the 50th Tradicional Corrida Goyesca (Goya-esque bullfight). Founded by Philip II in 1572 to help protect southern Spain, the order no longer performs a military function but is instead an impressive cultural institute with a fabulous ancient library that specialises in genealogy, heraldry, chivalry and bullfighting. King Juan Carlos is the head of the order, and it is run by the charming and scholarly Anglophile Rafael Atienza, the Marquess of Salvatierra. The Plaza de Toros, built in 1785, is the home of the modern Spanish bullfight and the Ordóñez brothers are local Ronda boys. Their father died in the ring, their grandfather was an idol of Hemingway’s and their great-grandfather was also a matador. The colour, history, pageantry, aristocratic guests — I sat between a brace of duchesses — the gorgeous Goya-inspired dresses of the women, Adonic good looks of the brothers and the press fascination with their complicated love lives all went to make the occasion rather like a cross between the Cup Final and the state opening of Parliament before the abolition of the hereditary element of the House of Lords.
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The bulls were fortunately dispatched very quickly indeed. As Hemingway points out, a corrida is not a fight, or a sport in the English sense. ‘Rather it is a tragedy; the death of the bull, which is played, more or less well, by the bull and man involved and in which there is danger for the man but certain death for the animal.’ However true it is that the bull always goes for the cape rather than the man, it is still enormously brave of the matador to come so close to the huge enraged beast as it charges. I got a sense of what it must have been like to visit the Colosseum of Ancient Rome. I wish I could be high-minded enough to claim I didn’t enjoy watching the whole amazing spectacle, but the simple fact is that I really did. (Since I’m moving house this week, please address all hate mail, death threats, etc., c/o The Spectator.)
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