What was that about London and being tired of life? Or that flickering ecstasy of a long ago memory of being drunk at dawn and watching people going to work? Surely not at my age and in the year 2013, but there you have it. You can go home again, Thomas Wolfe had it all wrong. I felt at home all last week, at Loulou’s, on Gerald Road, and in deep Oxfordshire.
Let’s start with Gerald Road, where the Bismarcks gave a Pugs dinner to celebrate Bob Miller’s 80th birthday, Bob being the Duty Free billionaire who — surprise, surprise — is as nice, down-to-earth and sporty a man as he is rich. We took the annual picture, the three oldies — Bob, George Livanos and myself — seated up front, youngsters such as Edward Hutley, Leopold Bismarck, Princes Pavlos and Nikolaos of Greece, Roger Taylor, Arki Busson, Tim Hoare and Nick Scott standing behind us. There was a cake in the shape of a boat, as Bob is a very good and record-holding yachtsman, lots of exotic drinks, and then the grey dawn was upon us. (I did see the sun, but it was in Switzerland, before coming over here.)
Later on in the day, having chosen to flame out rather than rust out, I managed to stagger to our annual lunch, a stone’s throw from Elizabeth Street, where our oldest member, Sir Christopher Lee, was already holding court. He is now 92, has been in more than 280 films, is far more lucid than I could ever be, and was applauded by strangers as he got up after a very liquid lunch and some not so articulate efforts at speech-making by yours truly.
Getting reacquainted with a bed was a pleasant surprise later on in the afternoon, and the next thing I knew I was back at Loulou’s, my old friend Robin Birley’s life-saving club, at 5 Hertford Street.
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