A nice package arrived by post just as I was going to ring a friend in London and inquire how old and how good a title is if the bearer uses it more often than a footballer says the F-word. I will not name the bum because I did a few weeks back and he doesn’t need any more publicity. All I’ll say is thank God for the Almanach de Gotha, which arrived in brilliant cardinal red for 2012, and beautiful Byzantine yellow for the 2013 edition. I thank the publisher John Kennedy because the 189th edition of the Gotha comes in very handy. There are more phonies flitting about than there are blonde Russian hookers, and the Almanach is the ultimate judge of who is real.
The person I was ringing London about, incidentally, ain’t hardly up with the real oldies, but made it through morganatic marriages and other such climbs. Your humble High Life correspondent is mentioned twice, both times through marriage, which makes me look like a gigolo. But what the hell, I’ll take it, I’m in the Ionian Isles Gold Book, which for some strange reason is not included in the Almanach.
So women made me, according to the good book, which is only fair. I’ve spent the better part of my life thinking, yearning, lusting and chasing after them, so the least they could do is ennoble poor little me. Our own Melanie McDonagh wrote in the 9 March Speccie on the 50 years of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. How I remember the dates of late March 1963, although back then if I’d heard the word Friedan I would have thought it had something to do with freedom in Sudan, a place I had recently escaped from once the locals decided to nationalise my dad’s giant textile factory.
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