DIARY
NICHOLAS COLERIDGE Thousands of words have been devoted to describing the recent Paris fashion col- lections, but nobody mentioned how much nudity there was. At John Galliano's rather brilliant show, which had an Egyptian theme, many of the supermodels were to all intents and purposes stark naked. Sitting in the front row at the Musee des Monuments Francais, I could have reached out and touched a score of superbreasts or stroked the furry pudenda of a dozen girls as they paraded by. Since we were all there in a professional capacity, to watch a creative event, it is considered indelicate to com- ment on nudity; you are meant to be notic- ing the clothes, such as they are, not lech- ing over the girls. But the fact is, upper- class British models like Jodi Kidd and Stella Tennant are now so famous that there is something startling — and, let's admit it, sexy — in seeing them like this at such close quarters. Jodi Kidd has perkier boobs than you would have expected, by the way, while Stella Tennant looks neat below the waist. I kept thinking that only boyfriends or gynaecologists would normal- ly see this, and how seductive the idea of high fashion must be that models who would be horrified by striptease will so will- ingly strip off for Galliano.
0 f all the shameless things I undertook to hype my new novel With Friends Like These, my favourite was a marathon Water- stone's literary lunch in Manchester. For a start, there were no fewer than five speak- ers, the others being Michael Dobbs, Ger- ald Kaufman MP, Sebastian 'Birdsong' Faulks and a mysterious Chinese anaes- thetist, Adelin Yen Mah. A couple of hun- dred Mancunians, more dressed-up than an equivalent audience down south, had rolled up to the Ramada Hotel to hear the five of us plugging our wares. There was outrage among the other speakers, however, when we spotted in the programme notes that Sebastian Faulks had been singled out as `gorgeous': 'the gorgeous Sebastian' was how his biog kicked off. Nothing was said about the physical attributes of any other speaker. It struck Michael Dobbs and me as incredible that Faulks should have been selected for the appellation gorgeous when we, let alone Gerald Kaufman, had not. In his speech, Michael Dobbs told the audi- ence that there is a great fellowship among authors and that, while we compete for sales of our books, we are really part of one big happy family of writers. I suspect this was a tactic by Dobbs to get the audience on his side by playing the Mr Nice card. If so, then it worked. The moment of truth at a literary lunch comes when the authors leave the rostrum and sit behind a row of tables piled high with their books for sale. Within seconds, you can see who has won by the respective length of the queues. In Manchester, Dobbs won hands down. I came a respectable second, I couldn't help noticing. This was a relief. At a similar con- test in Cambridge years ago, I remember selling just three copies of a book while Jef- frey Archer, the top-of-the-bill speaker, sold 238. Even the waiters at the Garden House Hotel were handing over wads of cash. There is no more humiliating or lone- ly predicament than sitting behind a moun- tain of unsold books, entirely ignored, a brave smile playing on your lips, while the entire audience forms up at the next table.
Igave one of the Christina Noble lectures last Wednesday at the Royal Geographical Society. Normally these lectures are the preserve of bona fide travellers like Eric Newby and Robin Hanbury-Tenison, and I was doubtful that my riveting experiences in the club-class executive lounge on busi- ness trips would match theirs, or that any- one would turn up. In the event, 700 people chose a lecture over a bath or television. The section of my speech that seemed to strike a chord was about air miles, and how much simpler it is to accumulate them than to redeem them, since allocated seats on each flight are so stingy. Last April, I tried to use my miles to buy tickets to the Caribbean over Christmas. `Sorree,' said There's something not quite right about it.' the British Airways air miles woman. 'All seats to the Caribbean have gone already.' `What about Sri Lanka, then?' I could hear her tapping at a keyboard, down the line, and sighing. `Sorree, all gone.' India?' `Whereabouts in India?' Anywhere in India,' I replied, 'anywhere at all. Delhi, Bombay, Madras, Cochin, Trivandrum, Calcutta, Goa . . . We'll build our holiday around your air miles.' There was more tapping and muttering. At last she came back, a note of triumph in her voice. 'I've found one,' she said. 'You can use miles on this. You fly to Dacca."Dacca! But Dacca isn't in India. It's the capital of Bangla- desh."Oh, is it?' she replied. 'It's confus- ing, isn't it, with all these foreign-sounding names?' Meanwhile my stash of air miles continues to swell, like some restricted for- eign currency — the rupee or the rouble impossible to exchange for anything else. After I'm dead, they will probably include my frequent-flyer fortune in the 'What They Left' column in the Daily Telegraph. The estate of Nicholas David Coleridge: 2.5 million air miles to be divided equally among his widow and three children.
Recently we spent a Friday evening at a ball at the Grosvenor House hotel in aid of Medecins sans Frontieres. Normally we go to immense lengths to avoid going out on Friday nights, especially to the Grosvenor House, but we like the couple who invited us, so found ourselves saying yes. It turned out to be unexpectedly enjoy- able and surprisingly glitzy for a right-on overseas aid organisation, marred only by the inevitable auction. Auctions at charity balls are a growing menace. When you hear there's about to be an auction, a great wave of despondency overtakes the room. The prizes being bid for are usually awful: this time they included a platinum disc belong- ing to Eric Clapton for writing the music for the film Wayne's World, a self-improve- ment course for two and a photographic portrait session by Paul Mowatt, the over- weight, stroppy-looking husband of Marina Ogilvy. The auctioneer, Hugo Swire of Sotheby's, who has cornered the market as pet gavel-wielder to charity fundraisers, did a valiant job in soliciting bids from the floor. Last time I witnessed Swire in action he shamed me publicly into buying a per- fectly useless whale weathervane, so I kept my head down. As ever, every lot was bid for by a small cabal of show-offs. The pro- cess invariably takes the best part of an hour, by which point the party has lost momentum. A concerted campaign against auctions at society balls isn't going to win anyone a Pulitzer prize, but it would be a service to mankind.
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