Life isn’t all beer and skittles, sure. But sometimes it is Champagne and polo (I don’t play, though the Argentine captain once gave me a lesson that ended swiftly when I almost knocked out my horse with the mallet. “We don’t do that,” he said, sniffily lighting a cigarette).
Last week is perhaps illustrative. Look, between us, it’s been known to happen, but most afternoons I’m not found alone and bewildered in a five-star hotel’s bar. That was the game on Thursday; the Corinthia had beckoned me into Velvet, so named as it is a room decorated in the style of ballgowns draped over baby grands. The bar top is piano black, the walls a jewelled red. And while I was at that bar, with nobody but the barman around, a drink appeared that looked like a basketball.
