High life | 9 July 2015

Wow, what a week. London may be bad for one’s health, but it sure makes it fun on the way to where we’re all going. I’m determined not to mention Greece — too much has been written about my poor country, most of it quite nice — so I will stick to London in general and The Spectator in particular. It began with a nostalgic party for about 28 chez George and Lita Livanos, childhood friends, in their treasure-filled house in Mayfair. A drunken lunch in a St James’s club followed, five old buddies reminiscing about the days when hangovers didn’t register. Then it was on to The Spectator’s summer party, which was ruined for me by the warning that a letter to me from Speccie girls would appear in the magazine the next day, and by the fact that my colleague Hugo Rifkind shoved me under a shower in the gents that left me drenched and looking as though I was perspiring in an excessive Hellenic manner. (I had to go upstairs, where my editor Lucy slaves away, undress, and hang my shirt and jacket in front of a fan. After about ten minutes, a lady walked in and screamed. ‘You’re not supposed to be doing this,’ she cried. But I was only half naked, the top half, so she did protest rather a lot.)

Now what can one say about the best magazine in the English-speaking world that hasn’t been said already. I’ll tell you: it is a family that could have been painted by Norman Rockwell. It is an idealised depiction of a weekly’s microcosm: the Hollywood handsome top banana, the Andy Hardy-like deputy editor, the man-torturing commissioning (sigh) editor, and a lot of beautiful, Siren-like young maidens straight out of TheOdyssey. (I should have tied myself to the mast, but the new Bushido is still in dry dock.)