Gstaad It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, with a 24-hour non-stop snowfall, an empty main street, and the closing of the Palace hotel as well as of the Eagle club. (I give the traditional closing-day speech at the club, and this year’s was judged to have been politically incorrect.) The older I get
‘Did I tell you about our Japanese au pair, Hideko? A lovely girl, speaks excellent English, but sometimes we have the most ludicrous misunderstandings. At breakfast one morning she started talking about the proms, you know, the promenade concerts. And my wife and I thought she was talking about the plums — we’ve got this
Someone calling herself the Aviva Customer Experience Manager has been in touch. I’m not entirely sure what sort of experience she was intending to give me but she ended up giving me a thoroughly horrible one. I wonder if Aviva employed the Customer Experience Manager on the basis of her ability to give people horrible
Is George Osborne too much of a toff to lead the Conservative party? On the face of it, the answer’s no, even if he does look like ‘a powdered French aristocrat’ (Charles Moore). Douglas Hurd was ruled out on the grounds that he was a titled ex-public schoolboy, but that was 22 years ago. If
For a country in which ‘gay marriage’ is supposedly still illegal it seems to be happening rather a lot. Gay weddings are already big business, and hard-pressed country house owners are desperate to host them. One grandee who has cashed in spectacularly is Earl Spencer, brother of the late Diana, Princess of Wales. Five years
Rory McIlroy used to be the world’s best golfer. He bagged the No. 1 ranking by winning the Honda Classic in Florida at the start of the month. It was a dream realised. Already a major championship winner, he held off a magnificent final-day charge by Tiger Woods to claim the top spot in the
Q. I went to lunch in the new house of a rather competitive woman. We have friends in common, without being particular friends ourselves. After lunch she showed me round this (slightly overblown) new mansion in Kensington and I was amazed to see two bathrooms off her marital bedroom. Naturally I enthused, out of politeness,
Sometimes I think luxury is a joke played on the rich by the not-so rich. In my mind, people on the 20p tax rate have a focus group, and design things to sell to the rich, and laugh. And I think this explains sandals with mink T-bars, most watches and now Hix, a restaurant under
On 22 August 1662, the day before the new queen arrived at Whitehall in a barge so surrounded by craft that ‘we could see no water’, Samuel Pepys walked over to Mr Creede’s lodging and had ‘a little banquet’ (meaning fruit and sweets and wine) ‘and I had liked to have begged a parrett for
