. . . and truncheons and snowdrops

Alistair McAlpine, one-time treasurer of the Tory party, is not a conventional fellow. A picker up of unconsidered trifles, he has in his time collected truncheons, chickens and snowdrops. He gets crazes and then he moves on: whole collections go under the hammer. ‘No object or painting has such beauty that I could not bear to part with it,’ he writes. Eclecticism is his game. In his houses, the beautiful and the strange come and go, but in Lord McAlpine’s head he keeps the oddities that have appealed to his mind. Rich men can go anywhere, whenever they like, and the insatiable curiosity of this one has taken him all over the world. If the mood seizes him, he can hop on a train in the south of France at dusk and be in Venice by dawn.

The adventurous collector knows where to eat and shop both on and off the beaten track. Cigar boxes, ‘stunning chests of drawers’ and ‘serious knives’ (‘the Swiss army knife is only useful for small boys to show to their friends’) all claim his attention. He goes to restaurants in the Venetian lagoon where working people flock on Sunday. He fingers shirts at Charvet in Paris and decides not to buy them. (If Lord McAlpine can’t afford the price, who can, one wonders?). He hangs about in Georgia taking tea with the spiritual leader of several million Sufi Muslims, and in LA he goes in search of the perfect cowboy boots – leather and rhinestones at 5,000 dollars – but they don’t fit. In Bali ‘a Far Eastern Disneyland’, where the fakes they make end up looking better than the originals, he cannot resist four silk umbrellas, three to a pole.