Taki
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Sex and attraction defy Cartesian analysis and are actually a pain in the you-know-what. I used to think that once old age set in the demons that drove me to chase women non-stop would go the way of my backhand. On the contrary. As the backhand got stronger — I stopped hitting top spin and began to slice, saving energy and making it safer — so did my appetite for the fairer sex. This past winter in Gstaad I stayed home every Sunday night and watched Nurse Jenny looking angelic and innocent while delivering babies that looked anything but. Then I read the bad news just before the series came to an end. And decided to throw in the towel. This is it, finita, la commedia! Even Taki has a breaking point, and seeing a photograph of her walking with a redhead who was not Simon Heffer made my blood boil. Perhaps we’ll get together in the next life.
And things got worse. For years I’d been banging into glass doors until an eye test discovered cataracts and glaucoma, the result of getting hit around the eyes and of old age. I went to a specialist in the Bagel and walked out immediately. Two Russian secretaries straight out of the Gulag shoved paperwork at me and made me sit between two smelly men. A Chinese woman kept coughing without covering her mouth. I walked out, twice. The second time the waiting-room was even worse.
Anyway, in Lausanne, in Clinique Montchoisi, I found the best eye doctor in the world and the best eye clinic, with nurses straight out of Call the Midwife. I had both eyes operated on and now I can’t see a thing but I am told my sight will return better than ever if I stand still for a week or so. (My friends Clive and Ann Gibson recommended it and I am eternally grateful.)
As I couldn’t read or watch the idiot box, I listened to music. And what music! It was as good as Mozart and Schubert, but a bit more modern: boogie-woogie. Boogie-woogie emerged from the blues, at a much faster clip. Pinetop Perkins, Little Red Clay, and the greatest of them all, Jerry Lee Lewis, to whom I could listen play ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ and ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’ non-stop for the rest of my life.
Jerry Lee got a bum rap from those do-gooders who are trying to run our lives when he married his 13-year-old cousin back in the Fifties. These same do-gooders say nothing when a rich 80-year-old Saudi slob marries an 11-year-old girl whose family has sold her to him. (Not an unusual practice on the sandy peninsula.) Jerry Lee Lewis is my hero and his piano playing makes today’s untalented, cacophonous bunch who pass as pop stars look like the cheap conmen that they are.
And speaking of conmen and sandy hellholes, what about these Qatari and Saudi bums who are buying up Europe with us Europeans grovelling before them, starting with Sandhurst, which replaced the name of Mons with Hamad of Bahrain for its main hall. (Is the Parthenon next? Perhaps, if it was British.) These Arabs are buying up everything in case the sleepy ones ever wake up and kick them out. They also know that the Europeans will fight for them if the Islamists decide they’d like a share of the high life too. Europe is weak and bribable, and starting with the Brits and the French, it will sell shamelessly its very soul for Arab ill-gotten gains. And we will never learn. Instead of backing Assad to the hilt, we’re making noises against him so the Islamist extremists can take over in future. William Hague must be taking a dive. No one could be that stupid after what happened in Libya, with the great political expert Taki having led the charge against Gaddafi. My excuse is that I’m a fool. What’s Hague’s?
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