Gstaad Talismans from the past are rare but still to be found, especially at the old Posthotel. Faded bleached photographs of horse-drawn sleds on Main Street, long-bearded peasants chopping wood on the Eggli, even skiers walking up mountains in knee-deep snow before ski lifts were invented. Is there anything more precious than old photographs? Killjoy
Gstaad It’s nice to be back in good old Helvetia again, but as the holiest of holy days approaches I cannot help but think of my friend Jeremy Clarke and his struggles. Philosophers, starting with the Greeks, have dealt with life’s problems yet not one of them has been able to pin down Man’s ultimate
New York It’s party time in the Bagel, and also the last week I’ll be spending in this unrefined place. The Bagel has lost its je ne sais quoi for me. It is now as subtle as a knocked-out Russian T-72 stuck in the mud. There’s as much wit around here as there used to
Why bother with something true to life, dignified and classy when you can create something untrue, cheap and vulgar? While surfing through channels looking for a black and white oldie, I came across something that I think is called Rogue Heroes. I’m not sure of the title because the programme annoyed me so much that
New York Christmas partying, like Yuletide shopping displays, begins much earlier of late. After the lockdown, however, the urge to party, and party hard, is justified. Like others, I am trying to make up for the missing two years, but the hangover toll is prohibitive. It takes a whole two days to feel normal again,
New York The LNG king Peter Livanos, an old and good friend, has sent me a very informative write-up about China. Peter knows as much as anyone what’s cooking behind what used to be known as the bamboo curtain, and he’s put me right about China when I’ve been wrong about the place in the
New York An American columnist whose writing I used to enjoy until his bosses signalled to him that activism is more important than journalism recently reported that Americans are unhappier now than they have ever been. Especially in places that voted for The Donald. Apparently, a pollster found that Trump got the most votes in
There are heroes and then there are unsung ones, and I basically prefer the latter as I have known a few of them in my lifetime. The funny thing is that I grew up learning only about famous heroes, the Ancient Greek type, starting with the semi-God Achilles. Homer didn’t deal with unsung heroes; everyone
New York Ms Geniece Draper is a Noo Yawker who has been in the news lately. She is a 40-year-old with modern Bagelite manners, and by that I mean they are not exactly those of, say, C.Z. Guest or Babe Paley, two ladies who are no longer with us but whose presence in drawing rooms
New York Rodney Dangerfield was the American Benny Hill: lewd, funny and not exactly politically correct where the weaker sex was concerned. In America today there is no room for Rodney’s or Benny’s shenanigans, and leering at women is now commensurate with having one’s rocket polished in broad daylight, perhaps even more so. I find
New York That Kim Kardashian dame being fined by the Securities and Exchange Commission for a ‘pump and dump’ scheme should help add victimhood to her other assets. Everyone in this country revels in being a victim, or so it seems when watching the news or reading the papers. Here’s our own Jeremy Clarke, as
New York I am seriously thinking of visiting a shrink (just kidding) as I now have definite proof that I am crazy. Instead of remaining in England and going to Badminton for the Duke of Beaufort’s 70th birthday bash, and catching a glimpse of the love of my life, Iona McLaren, I find myself in
Harvard man Russell Seitz has sent me an extraordinary present as an object lesson in ‘what a magazine should be in case you start another one’. The paper has yellowed and is dog-eared, pages are falling out and the print is faint. But the Transatlantic Review, Vol. 1, No. 1, dated January 1924, is a
Privilege at birth displeases wannabe types, and the subject came up rather a lot last week, especially in the Land of the Depraved, where the Bagel Times regards monarchy as anti-democratic and the cause of most human ills, including the common cold, cancer, pimples, varicose veins and even athlete’s foot. In my own alma mater,
None of this would have happened had I accepted my neighbour’s invitation to dine with a Swiss billionaire banker, or bb. (Sorry, Real life.) He’s an old friend, the bb, and untypically Swiss. He boozes, schnoofs, and chases women, or Afabs, as the absurd youth of today call them. Booze, alas, now goes to my
Gstaad There’s a fin de saison feeling around here, but the restaurants are still full and the sons of the desert are still moping around. Building is going on non-stop and the cows are down from the mountains, making the village a friendlier and more civilised place. Something of a twilight mood has crept in,
Nostalgia barged in like gangbusters. What brought it on was a brief article about the most charming and enchanting of young women, Nancy Olson. Seventy-two years ago, she was in that rare gem of a movie, Sunset Boulevard, playing the rosy-cheeked screenwriter who was the love interest of William Holden, the writer who was handsome
Gstaad As the great Yogi Berra explained: ‘It’s déjà vu all over again.’ The great one also contributed the following wisdom that: ‘You can observe a lot by just watching.’ Yogi came to mind as high inflation and a recession loom, and merry old England’s trade unions are reverting to type and blackmailing the government.
Coronis I suppose there’s always a first time, and looking back it was bound to happen. I scrambled off a sailing boat and took the coward’s way out after being bashed about by an angry Poseidon and a furious Aeolus. Actually it was the wife who couldn’t take it any more and I simply went
An F. Scott Fitzgerald biographer by the name of David S. Brown refers to America’s promotion of deviancy (my words) as ‘the great post-Appomattox launch toward materialism’. I liked that line and was thinking about it as I left the boat in the early morning and walked into an almost perfect Greek village square for
