What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?
Happily, I have outlived most of my more athletic contemporaries, who jogged, golfed and squashed themselves into coronary occlusion, but I really admire Monty and so does the Queen, I discovered. Last year the Monarch bestowed on me a small but colourful token of the Nation’s esteem, and after the ceremony at Buckingham Palace I was due to go to Guildford to attend one of Monty’s spectacular and moving demonstrations. In the brief moment I had with the Queen, I mentioned I was going to see Monty and she lit up, almost ecstatically. ‘What on earth did you say to the Queen?’ my friends asked later. ‘I just dropped the name of a cowboy,’ I replied.
Despite my hatred of sport, I confess that I do have Amelia, my little blonde Australian personal trainer who wakes me up every morning and drags me out for a walk or a swim, if the hotel pool is free of incontinent kiddies. There are pools I have encountered on this interminable American tour which are nothing more than big blue specimens. Now we are in Los Angeles and staying at the magnificent old Biltmore hotel downtown, the ‘Host of the Coast’ and once the playground of movie stars, presidents, royalty, and Shirley Temple. If only the clientele had been restored along with the building. Alas, the opulent marble halls in the Renaissance style are now thronged with conference delegates wearing back-to-front baseball caps, three-quarter-length cargo shorts and flip-flops, not seldom jamming doughnuts down their throats and swigging from bottles of Budweiser and Dr Pepper. On our walks around town there are still marvellous buildings from the Twenties and Thirties to be seen, especially the Richard Riordan Central Library by Bertram Goodhue, in the Egyptian style of 1926 and crowned with a mosaic pyramid. Walking in this area, as in too many other American cities, it is necessary to step over or give a wide berth to those trickling bundles sprawled on the pavement or huddled against walls. It’s tough, but as the doorman advised me, ‘It’s better not to think of them as people.’
The third act of the show, always the hardest, occurs in the dressing room after the performance when friends, family, fans and total strangers congregate to drink whatever I provide, still or sparkling. Incidentally, I wonder when exactly fizzy water became ‘sparkling’? Probably when it became expensive. I have cruelly tried it on a waiter: ‘May I have fizzy water please but not sparkling?’ The result was as the reader might have expected, and the waiter thought I was a loony. Many of the hotels I have been staying in provide bottled drinking water, or ‘designer’ water from Norway and some Pacific island or other. On holiday some years ago, I actually glimpsed the plant where this exotic and expensive liquid is bottled and noticed that it was upholstered with slime. The tap is still my preferred source of refreshment.
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