Gstaad
OK, sports fans! The Davos irrelevance is over, Gstaad is covered with the white stuff, and in St Moritz the Russian crooks are laying a Stalingrad-like siege to the town’s ultra-expensive boutiques. So what else is new? Gstaad covered with snow, that’s what’s new. Let’s start with Davos, where publicity-seekers such as George Soros posed and postured about being against income inequality. What phonies these bums are, just as bad as the Occupy protestors but with two or three private jets and large ugly stinkpot yachts. (Unlike Taki, who has a large but beautiful sailing boat.)
Growth for the sake of growth is a capitalist mantra, and bubbles will always burst after a while, and the Occupy protestors are pissing against a tsunami and there’s nothing they can do except get on the telly for their 15 seconds of fame, which is all they’re looking for in the first place as they have yet to come up with a solution to capitalism’s problems. These are the facts, the rest is whistling Dixie, as they say back home down south, not exactly where I come from.
The flawed currency union has bankrupted Europe, and I predict a permanent slump in the southern part of the old continent — at least for my lifetime — yet I read not exactly with glee that this Ashton woman in Brussels is seeking an extra £22 million for her euro diplomats. The continent is bust, mothers cannot feed their children in Greece, and this grotesque woman has breached her budget and demands extra money for the European diplomatic service, whatever that is.
My father, who knew a thing or two about these parasites, would always ask a diplomat how rich a wife he had married. ‘Comment?’ They would fake outrage in the language of diplomacy, but he would cut them off at the pass by saying he had never met a diplomat who wasn’t a gigolo at heart, and that would be the end of the civilised conversation. Old dad may have been a bit tough on that particular species, but he did have a point. Diplomats do have good manners but they also live off others, and the Ashton woman can hardly speak French, which illustrates my point that they’re all a bunch of parasites, especially if they can’t recite a bit of Molière like a bourgeois gentilhomme should. More money for Europe diplomats is as obscene as it gets.
But back to more pleasant subjects, like welcoming Charles Moore to the concussed club. You read about it in his Spectator Notes three issues ago. Getting knocked out does feel dreamlike and in slow motion. I’ve been concussed about five times, once quite severely when a guy called Wilson, on the British karate team, made contact with my chin and the back of my head made contact with the hard wooden floor.
As Charles asked, does death feel like that? I sure hope so, especially if the man in the white suit is a judo player. Being choked out in judo is downright pleasant and there’s no hangover. If your opponent has a tight grip on your Adam’s apple and you decide to tough it out and not tap out, you will pass out and feel no pain. Five seconds later you will have oxygen again and come back feeling like a million bucks. Well, a million drachmas, anyway. Welcome to the club, Charles; it’s quite an exclusive one especially nowadays with all that health and safety bulls—t.
And speaking of safety, we are told by Lord Patten — a favourite of mine because his pretty daughters and he cried when handing over Hong Kong — that Rupert Murdoch shredded his book in order to curry favour with the Chinese leadership. Sure, of course he did, but he was also scared for his life because of the dragon lady he’s married to. Wendi China, or whatever her name was before she married Murdoch the peacock, would have given him one of those roundhouses she learned back in some Chinese alley, and that would have been the end of him. Better to pulp a book then turn into pulp, eh, Rupee?
Yes, folks. They say living well is the best revenge, and I’ve been living well as of late, and I even went to yet another great party way up in the snow-covered mountains, one given by the president of the Eagle club, Urs Hodler, to celebrate his long and very happy marriage to his wonderful wife Alice. We all met in the tiny hamlet of Saanen, got into a bus and went up a tiny road to a hut where great wine and food awaited us. Just before we took off I tried a Hanbury — it’s called that because Tim Hanbury once stole a bus full of Japanese tourists while the driver was relieving himself in the middle of Berkeley Square. He eventually ran out of room in a tiny mews nearby and left the tourists looking confused because that’s not what they had signed up for. The fuzz arrived but Timmy was nowhere to be seen, having gone back to Annabel’s where the staff swore to the cops he had never left. But when I tried a Hanbury I couldn’t find the handbrake, and my passengers were not in a Japanese mood, so I meekly turned it over to the driver and had a hell of a good time getting drunk high up in a mountain without a single oligarch in sight.
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