High life | 30 August 2018

Gstaad

The pastoral heaven of this place can get very dull during the summer months. Green hillsides, neat farmsteads, pleasing breezes, meadows bright with wild flowers amid white-capped mountain peaks; these are no substitute for pretty women or intellectual company. That is the bad news. The good news is that the nouveaux riches and terribly vulgar do not appear during the summer. They’re too busy sweating it out in the south of France or in Marbella. They do show up during the winter months, alas, but the low temperatures keep them covered in chinchillas. To see them in bathing costumes would be too much, even for someone like me who has witnessed some pretty gruesome sights in his lifetime. It is now 60 long years that I’ve been coming to Gstaad, and the place sure has changed. For the better as far as the locals are concerned; for the catastrophically worse from the point of view of yours truly. There is no doubt that the locals have benefited greatly from the arrival of the moneybags, just as there is no doubt that most of those moneybags are vulgar and ugly. I say most, not all, as two or three of my closest friends in this place would be considered very rich even by Saudi Arabian standards. (Speaking of which, that wicked regime has targeted and murdered innocent children with its American missiles. It has starved thousands, and facilitated the spread of cholera in Yemen. But because they’re rich, we genuflect and look the other way.) Which is what I do — look the other way, that is — most of the time when I’m in Gstaad. The hordes arriving in southern Europe from Africa have nothing on some of the throng coming up from Geneva. The difference is that the latter have lotsa moolah, and there is nothing worse, as far as I’m concerned, than lotsa moolah and no manners.