Petronella Wyatt has narrated this article for you to listen to.
One of my exes is trying to get me arrested. I discovered this when I received an email from the Met Police saying that he had accused me of stealing his belongings. As he is not a British citizen, the nice policeman I spoke to said I need do nothing in response. I was puzzled, until I remembered that after we had parted ways my ex had said: ‘I’d like to see you behind bars.’ I hadn’t realised he had meant it literally. The bastard.
When we parted ways, my ex had said: ‘I’d like to see you behind bars.’ I hadn’t realised he meant literally
I wondered what I had seen in him, apart from his looking like a lovesick Satan. I have consistently willed myself to accommodate men whose teeth I should have knocked out. There was my former beau Henry (not his real name, of course). Henry was not an intoxicating mental cinema but had a certain androgynous allure and a house in Dorset shrouded in sea mists. He was obsessed with anything to do with war and employed an ex-serviceman as a cook. The man was an ill-tempered halfwit, who ignored my tentative menu suggestions, saying: ‘Would Moddam like me to prepare a roast swan?’ Moddam, whose mouth used to distend with fear in his presence, would have liked that very much compared with what he did prepare.
On one occasion, guests were presented with red-and-white spheres resembling suppurating boils. ‘Is this parrot?’ asked Dougie Hayward, the 1960s couturier who swung with Terence Stamp and Richard Burton. Then there was Henry’s fetish for military uniforms. He had a cellar full of dummies clad in the damn things. After he commissioned a Hussar uniform for my Christmas present, I discharged myself from further service. He retaliated by claiming that on Christmas Day my mother had pocketed the gold sovereigns from the plum pudding.
I go for the tempestuous, ornery ones, like a zealot who has discovered an arcane cult. As a result, I often fall out with my exes or their new inamoratas. When Boris took up with Carrie, I found my phone numbers blocked. Perhaps I shouldn’t have suggested to him that she fix her teeth. Still, there is nothing like a failed love affair to bring on Byronic unhappiness and the feeling that ‘There’s not a joy the world can give like that it takes away’.
I’m unlucky at love. It may be my excessive desire for approbation that is to blame. As my late pal Lauren Bacall said: ‘I’m hard to get. All you have to do is ask me.’ The ancients took a more sensible approach. The Greeks regarded moderation in all things as an essential virtue. Under the influence of Romanticism, this view was abandoned and overmastering desires were admired, even if they were destructive. In life there must be balance between different passions, and no one of them must be carried so far as to make the others impossible. Fat people, for instance, sacrifice all pleasures to that of eating and in doing so diminish the total happiness of their lives, as well as taxpayers’ money when they waddle to A&E.
Other passions can be taken to excess. The Empress Joséphine was a terrible frock addict. When Napoleon refused to stump up, she went to the war minister and demanded that he pay for her clothes out of funds provided for military campaigns. Since he knew that she had the power to get him dismissed he did so, and the French lost Genoa in consequence.
My misfortune in love is less costly, but seems to run in the family. I had a Hungarian grandmother who, in the 1930s, fell for a Catholic priest. The wretched man killed himself after breaking his vows. She then turned her attention to a fascist who, after the war, fled to Rio with her jewels. One of my great aunts reacted so badly to her triste little affairs that each time one ended she threw herself into the Danube. This happened so often that the chief of the Budapest police ordered his officers to stop pulling her out.
I found my phone numbers blocked. Perhaps I shouldn’t have suggested to Boris that Carrie fix her teeth
Her travails were a shame, as stable affection can promote great happiness, while a general self-confidence towards life comes from being accustomed to receiving the right sort of love. Consequently, I sometimes feel for Prince Harry, who instead of marrying a steadfast Brit, shackled himself to the deranged one-trick phoney from the States. I never quite realised how awful Meghan was until I heard an intriguing piece of gossip. According to a courtier friend of mine, before the late Queen died, she described the Duchess of Sussex as ‘a bad woman’. As I always say, there is stupid and then there is Harry stupid.
As for me, perhaps I’m a late developer when it comes to that funny thing called love. My other great aunt was 75 when she first married. Not one to penetrate the imposture of mere good looks, she chose as her mate a 45-year-old carpenter who resembled Montgomery Clift. I suspect that he married her for her furniture, but there’s hope for me yet.
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