Diary – 3 May 2012

I am extremely lucky and have a charmed life. But this is a hard-luck story. And like much journalistic endeavour, it’s drawn from a wellspring of bitterness and resentment. Recently I was invited to Mustique. It’s a bland paradise. The beaches are raked each morning, as is the sand underneath the trees just behind the beaches. There is a never-ending rota of parties in beautiful villas hosted by smiling people with globally successful businesses. Teletubbies for billionaires. If, infantilised by your surroundings, you happen to leave your clothes somewhere on the island, before you’ve noticed they will be returned to you, laundered and pressed by the servants of The Mustique Company. If you leave your book hanging open as you dribble into your sun-lounger, unseen fingers will pick it up and put a post-it note marking the spot where you’d given up on the effort of reading. It really is very relaxing. Especially if you aren’t paying. But it’s quite hard to leave. Particularly if you’re flying home economy and habitually do your own washing.

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Rod Liddle

Sack the judges

Some years ago I appeared in The Pirates of the Caribbean, filmed on nearby St Vincent. On Mustique, having no wealth, I often found myself at the children’s table explaining which character I had played. With a glint I’d tell the kiddies that ‘Lord Cutler Beckett’ worked for the East India Company, in which long ago a few English people exploited many dark-skinned people in hot countries.

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There is a very rich old German lady on Mustique whose family have made the same thing for hundreds of years. She is sharp-eyed and still beautiful. Like many people who have inherited a vast  fortune, she prefers to think of herself as an artist. And if she isn’t someone who actually makes art, she has definitely bought a lot of it, occasionally ‘curated’ it, and has probably, over the years, slept with some of it too.