‘What’s Taki like?’ is a common response to my telling someone I’m a contributor to this magazine.
‘What’s Taki like?’ is a common response to my telling someone I’m a contributor to this magazine. People seem to think we regular contributors are jolly shipmates together, living out of hammocks in the hold. The prosaic truth is I’ve met Taki just twice, on each occasion at a Spectator party. The first time was on the steps at the old Doughty Street office while a mid-summer ‘At Home’ bash, measuring about a Force Nine on the Richter scale, was raging inside. Conscious of his career as an international black-belt karate champion, I bowed smartly and correctly, and shouted, ‘Oss, sensei!’ — which means, ‘I salute you, teacher!’
In my thirties, I trained with a Shotokan karate club and got up to the purple and white belt grade. But it was the bowing I was best at. I genuinely loved the ceremonial prelude to the violence, and the old- world virtues of deference and honour that the bowing symbolised. By bowing to Taki at our first meeting, and adressing him as sensei, I was presuming on this knowledge as a way of ingratiating myself, I suppose.
His response to my bow was reserved. All I got in return was a belated inclination of the head. And quite right, too. Only a fool would go to a party in London and feel obliged to return the formal bow of every drunk who’s been to a karate training session and knows the form.
In appearance, Taki is a spry, well-proportioned man. On that midsummer evening, he was comfortably and expensively dressed, clean shaven, and his fine hair was neatly barbered close to the scalp. He was noticeably light on his feet, faced me squarely, and searched my face eagerly with experienced eyes for signs of life or originality. His facial expression and conversation was kindly and humorous. He talked encouragingly about my tenure of the Low Life column. There was not a trace of egotism.
The next time I met Taki was at last year’s Spectator Editors’ Dinner in the grounds of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea. Perhaps five years had passed since I’d bowed to him on the steps at Doughty Street. This evening I merely offered him my mitt. We exchanged pleasantries and before we parted, he shot out a hand with the speed, accuracy and audacity of a black-belt champion and chucked me gently under the point of my chin. Impressive. Never mind the bowing, Mr Karate, he seemed to be implying: you didn’t see that coming, now, did you? To the people who ask me what Taki is like, I say with confidence that he is a gentleman, a sportsman and a top geezer.
Other people who say, ‘That Taki: what’s he like?’ aren’t asking a question: they are repeating a popular idiomatic cliché suggesting that Taki is surely a man who is beyond help or reason. The phrase in its newer sense is most often put to me by young Left-leaning journalists. They are frankly amazed that somebody who isn’t on the Left is still getting away with writing a weekly column in a British mainstream magazine. Not that they’ve ever read a High Life column in its entirety, I don’t suppose. And not that Taki is particularly on the Right as far as I can tell. I’ll concede that he does not appear to support the view that the march of human progress is heading steadily towards the sunlit uplands — but who any longer does? Taki has far too much experience of life, it seems to me, to have any truck with anything resembling political paradigms.
I tell these moralisers that this peasant, at any rate, enjoys Taki’s accounts of the doings of old aristocratic men with old money, and their dispeptic disdain for the rising class of the new men with their new money. I’d rather read about the foolishness and vanity of the individuals at the top of the food chain, than, say, the foolishness and vanity of those who are merely two thirds of the way up. And if Taki occasionally lowers his sights to pick off a few common or garden politicians with head shots, the carnage is exhilarating. In which other column but The Spectator High Life would you see Jack Straw described as a ‘low-life coward’ for having ‘kissed the black arse of the murdering Robert Mugabe’? (Ole!) Or Tony Blair and Lord Levy curtly dismissed as ‘hustlers and bull-shit artists’? (Bravo!)
Here, attractively served in large-format paperback with end flaps, with an elegant foreword by Charles Moore, and a marvellous seaside postcard-style cover by Heath, is the latest collection of our very own poor little Greek boy’s High Life columns —104 of them — chosen from the last decade by Charles Glass. Let us all bow in homage and gratitude. Oss, sensei!
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