High life | 20 September 2018

Perception and reality, truth and falsehood, black and white; nowadays the salivating chattering classes don’t know their arse from a hole in the ground, as they used to say in Brooklyn before the yuppies moved in. Take, for example, the latest kerfuffle about the moon landing 49 years ago. I remember it well because it was summer, I had just acquired my first sailing boat —thanks to good old dad, naturally — and the Americans, under the great president Richard Nixon, were going to land and walk on the moon. As everyone but a few doubters knows, Neil Armstrong was the first to take a step on its cheesy-looking surface, but I have bad news for you loyal readers.

First, though, the movie: First Man stars Ryan Gosling, an extremely good actor whom our very own Deborah Ross once described as unable to play Taki as well as Taki can. Hear, hear! Gosling, Alec Baldwin and I starred in the greatest movie ever made, Seduced and Abandoned, shown in Cannes back in 2013 and brilliantly reviewed by Debbie (she failed to advise our readers that if they glanced down at their bag of popcorn, they’d miss yours truly, but never mind).