High life
Modern manners
Taki
In an age of corporate looting, insider trading, commercial gouging and crass commercialism, it is well to ask why we are picking on Didier Drogba for cheating. One tries to emulate one’s betters, and, as Matthew Norman wrote in the Sunday Telegraph, when a co-owner of Birmingham City has done time for pimping and makes his loot as a pornographer, why shouldn’t an overpaid African footballer try bending the rules? Elementary, my dear Roman. After all, if Abramovich can become Britain’s richest man by bending it like Beckham, cheating, diving and using one’s hand to set up a goal should be considered virtues, not vices. Sport follows society, and always has.
Modern Britain, like America, is a brutal, violent place, where middle-class values and elitism stick in the throats of the slobs that lord it over us. Levelling down is the message. Down with Eton and Harrow, down with good manners, down with intelligence and good taste. England’s national pastime, as the Americans would call it, mirrors the state of the culture and society. C’est tout.
And speaking of good taste and good manners, I read about the Queen’s and Lady Pru Penn’s joint 80th birthday party. It took place at Bellamy’s, my friend Gavin Rankin’s restaurant in Mayfair, and a place I use often. Pru Penn I have met a couple of times at my friends Carolina and Reinaldo Herrera’s house, in the Bagel, both of whom were at the bash.
The first time I met her she told me how sad she was that I had been fired from The Spectator without even a word from the editor. This was immediately after my spoof column of goodbye about five years ago. So we became firm friends immediately. Then she came up with an even better story concerning yours truly. This took place around ten years or more ago. Pru was at a petrol station somewhere near Badminton, on the M4. It was around 11 in the morning. While waiting in her car, I apparently approached her and tried to pick her up. She said it was obvious I had been up all night and was under the influence, but that I was ‘very polite and friendly’. And it got worse. My pick-up line, it seems, was: did she she want to meet King Constantine of the Hellenes, who I claimed was travelling with me.
She declined, bid me adieu, and went on her way, according to her. After dinner, the penny suddenly dropped. I had been in the vicinity at around the time she said we met, and I had been up all night, and I was being driven to Badminton after a hell of an evening. What surprised me was that I would use the king of my country as bait. He was nowhere near, although I believe I had had dinner with him earlier, before things began to go out of focus.
Never mind, it was a fun story which Pru told with great relish, to the amazement of the Herreras and the mother of my children. ‘Do you often do this type of thing with ladies like Pru?’ asked Reinaldo, a close friend I’ve known for 50 years.
But back to sport. After six years of trying, Tim Henman has just beaten the egregious Aussie Lleyton Hewitt, and I couldn’t be happier. Henman is a gent from the old school of tennis — unlike this Murray fellow — and there is a precedent to his discovery about playing a waiting game before going up to finish the point. Back in 1954, while still at boarding school, I followed my hero Vic Seixas during his losing streak of ten straight matches to the great Ken Rosewall. Seixas charged the net even when returning a first serve, and Rosewall passed him like clockwork.
Vic and Tony Trabert, another great, travelled to Australia that winter to challenge for the Davis Cup, which was held by the incomparable Lew Hoad and Rosewall. Just before going on court, Seixas announced that it would be very difficult to lose 11 straight to no matter how great a player. And he didn’t, staying back and only rushing Rosewall’s forehand when the point was properly set up. (Going in on Ken’s backhand was automatic. No matter how deep the approach, you were passed.) Seixas, Trabert and Rosewall are still around and doing well. We lost Hoad to cancer ten years ago. What Lew would have done to the game with a modern racket is another matter altogether. He never made a defensive shot in his life, using a heavy wooden 16-ounce bat, hitting everything with topspin, taking the ball almost on a half-volley every time. Male tennis now bores me, as does Maria Sharapova, her Svengali father who looks like an ex-Soviet hitman, and those grunting Williams sisters who whine as much as they grunt. I root for Martina Hingis and Kim Clijsters, because they’re both cute, plump and feminine, and smile a lot. The rest are unwatchable and unbeddable, not that many female tennis players on the circuit are breaking down my doors in Cadogan Square.
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