The French say that everyone has two countries–their own and France. Some of us are even luckier. I have three countries and my lifestyle has involved living in all three. I was born in Australia, I live most of the time in Britain and in 1960 I discovered India.
It was a good time to do so. Bombay, where I landed from the old British India ship, the Dumra, was still a sleepy city where you had to beg the taxi-drivers to go a little faster. The Raj had not quite gone. There were still a few British banks pretending nothing had changed, with the occasional English remittance man queuing to collect his monthly cheque. A posse of English jockeys came down for the racing season, the Bombay Gymkhana still played Rugby, and if you were an Indian it was not easy to get into Breach Candy swimming pool.
The year 2003 marked the end of professional politics and the return of the celebrity politician, the man or woman whose face is instantly recognisable because we’ve seen it on the TV or the cinema screen but whose policies we neither know nor care about.
The election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor of California after a campaign in which he refused to define what he stood for, offer the slightest hint of what he planned to do about the state’s economic crisis, or debate anything at all with his political rivals, is bound to be copied and is another blow to democratic process.
In the middle of the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco, the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff came to President Kennedy and gave him the bad news. The Cuban-exile troops were trapped on the beach. Kennedy would have to reverse his public pledge and openly introduce American air and naval power if the invasion to topple Castro were to succeed.
Kennedy’s reaction was interesting. He did not say, as he well might have, that he could not risk such a move because it would provoke Moscow. Instead he was inclined to agree to protect his public image. He said he would “rather be called an aggressor than a bum.”
Three years into the government’s ten year strategy to fight drugs, the war is over. The government lost. Not only is Britain awash with drugs but they are more affordable and more easily available than ever before. The time has come to face the fact that drugs have become just another part of our leisure activity.
British kids spend as much on Ecstasy as the whole nation spends on tea and coffee. Cocaine is almost as freely available as alcohol and is nearly as popular. And it is not just the young, the trendy or the socially-deprived who are recreational drug users. Everyone’s at it.
The Notting Hill Gate, where I have lived for the past forty years, is a very different place than the one portrayed in newspapers during the Peter Mandelson affair.
There may be a few stars of politics, stage, screen, radio, TV, the modelling and fashion world who have chosen Notting Hill–often in the hope of a quiet time–but there are also a lot of hard-working, ordinary people just getting on with their lives who are none too happy to see their neighbourhood described as “exclusive. . . chic . . . fashionable . . . trendy.”
