High life | 20 August 2015

These are the languid, sensuous days of summer, and I’ve had another birthday, which is the bad news. But it’s the silly season, so I’m going to be silly yet again and tell you about Patrick and Isabelle Balkany, a couple who got into trouble last week in the land of cheese. I don’t know them, but I had the bad luck to run into the wife about 20 years ago in Rolle, Switzerland, where the Rosey school is located. It was September, the first day back at school, and my son J.T. was miserable at the prospect of going to boarding school for the first time. He had tried every trick in the book as his mother and I were driving him down from Gstaad. He invented all sorts of illnesses and finally pretended to fall asleep just as we were coming into Le Château du Rosey, where the school has its campus in the autumn and spring. (In the winter months, it moves up to Gstaad.)

Once we had registered him, he was assigned to a brand-new dormitory, which I almost had to carry him into. That’s when things took a turn for the worse. An unpleasant, very short woman with a long cigarette in her mouth was in the room with her son. She looked at us in the manner an Indian maharajah might once have looked at an untouchable. I tried some polite conversation about another Balkany, who was born Robert Zellinger but called himself Robert de Balkany, a man I had played polo with and against in Paris. ‘He’s a relation,’ said the woman, seemingly unimpressed by my name-drop. She kept puffing away, so Alexandra and I had to leave our little boy in that smoke-filled room and beat a hasty retreat back up the mountain.