Personally, I’d rather see Libyan justice meted out, and pronto. Like hanging a jockstrap out to dry, if you get my drift. The Gaddafi I’d most like to see acting as a jockstrap is Hannibal, the fat slob who has besmirched a glorious name by going around in super-yachts and private Boeings, and beating up women and helpless servants just for kicks — and getting away with it all these years. Hannibal should be forced to serve as a prostitute in a Libyan male brothel, unless he likes it, that is — he is a cognoscente of the profession — with his brother Saadi, the least talented football player ever, who was actually given a try-out by Juventus after buying 7 per cent of the team, washing up after him. Now that’s what I would call real moral justice, none of that 20 hours per day television-watching in The Hague, conjugal visits included. As of writing, the old mongrel is still nowhere to be seen, but if he has one brave bone left in his cowardly body, he will shoot himself in the arse, where his brain is located.
But back to Gstaad and the coming fight to the death. Europe has 3.1 million millionaires, while North America has 3.4 million of the same species. Asian millionaires have reached 3.3 million, and at times it feels as if all of the above drop in during the third week of August. Among the 10 million is one German woman married to a billionaire who has decided to buy the whole of Gstaad, and I mean the whole kit and caboodle, as they say in Kansas. Her husband has a couple of ex-wives and children with his exes, so the little lady has decided to ensure her future by having the old boy buy her Gstaad. Some of us old Gstaad hands have tried to poison the bitch but to no avail. She has Libyan food tasters and such.
Her latest scheme is to build an ‘art centre’ which will house conferences, concerts, caviar exhibitions and down-at-heel countesses looking for rich old buffers. In other words, everything a small Alpine village bursting at the seams is not in need of. Two hundred million Swiss francs are needed, and the usual social-climbing suspects are out knocking on doors. The mother of my children and I are manning the Ligne Maginot against the project, but our chances are as slim as those of those manning the real thing back in 1940. After all, greed equals fear where moolah is concerned.
Ironically, Gstaad during the horrible Sixties was an arts colony of sorts. We had the two great violinists Yehudi Menuhin and Nathan Milstein living here, William F. Buckley and Ken Galbraith, David Niven and Sir Roger Moore, even little old Taki, scribbling away in National Review. The incomparable Vladimir Nabokov, and his opera-singing son Dimitri, visited regularly, as did the New Yorker scribe Natacha Stewart. The idle rich played bridge, while the town whore, now long dead, was a Russian countess named Vera. This was then. Now the place is crawling with hookers but they pretend to be amateurs, doing it for love of sport.
The local peasantry back then was quiescent. They tilled their farms, operated the ski lifts, and taught the nouveaux how to slide down the slopes in the correct manner. It was paradise on earth; now it’s hell on skis, but only during the high season. Some time during the late Seventies a few peasants got together and decided to emulate the tourists. The quickest way to a fortune was to buy out the dumb ones and build glitzy chalets. Their scheme worked. For a few bucks local people sold their shops, only to see them replaced by expensive boutiques and Xanadus that would make Kublai himself green with envy.
There you have it, dear readers. Lesson number one: when approached by sharpies offering moolah for your humble shop, point them towards Libya and slam the door in their face. Then check if the doorknob is still there. Lesson number two: never underestimate the local peasantry, and never show off in front of them. High living is more catching than cholera, and it tends to give people ideas. Last and final lesson: when someone mentions art projects, disconnect his or her car’s brakes, preferably when parked on a steep hill. (If you’re not mechanical, I will provide a mechanic.)
We have a beautiful old church where the Yehudi Menuhin music festival has been held for the past 50 years. We have hotels with great rooms for conferences and the like. Plus we have outdoor spaces galore where tents for specific events can be erected. The last thing we need is hundreds of buses clogging the narrow single road leading to Gstaad and unloading arty-farty phonies looking to get a glimpse of sixth-division celebrities. Mind you, it could be worse. If it wasn’t for Nato, we could be looking forward to seeing the Gaddafi swine this coming winter. We already have plenty of the latter, and I don’t mean those wonderful porkies that I cross each day on my way up the mountain. As I’m finishing writing this, I have just seen Saif enter the Palace Hotel.
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