High life | 21 February 2013

Gstaad

The Alps are aglow as never before. A record snowfall and an abundance of sun have turned the region into a postcard of long ago. From afar, that is. Up close the cranes are ever-present, although during the season building is verboten

. For the past few years I’ve been meeting three Greek childhood friends once a week for lunch in a nearby inn. We drink Swiss white wine, eat trout straight out of the tiny pool they’re kept in, and talk. They are Aleko Goulandris, my oldest friend — we met in 1945 — Karolos Fix, a German Greek who arrived in that tortured land along with my ancestors back in the 1830s, with the first King Otto, from Bavaria, and Leonida Goulandris, who is the youngest at 52 years of age and whose parents were my friends long before he was born. When the King of Greece is in Gstaad, he is the fifth Hellene at the table. It is a male lunch that is transferred to Porto Heli during the summer months. It takes place every Tuesday — two days of recovery time — because weekends at the Palace tend to be rather crazy and confused. (Last Friday was the worst, 6 a.m. and counting.) Basically, it is an exercise in nostalgia. The state of our country is ever-present, needless to say. The timeless beauty of the land we grew up in is now gone. Athens is a stink hole. The marble-topped tables in the squares, the sweet, haunting, romantic music of Attik — he starved to death during the German occupation — the white-jacketed, impeccably polite waiters at the cafés, the graceful manners of ladies and gentlemen of society, the white-suited young men paying court to young ladies in ballrooms by the sea, all gone with the wind, and pardon the pun.