This is clearly an object de luxe, though I’m not clear about how it’s supposed to provoke admiring comment. Actually used as a bookmark? It’s a bit bulky for that. On a mantlepiece with the other cards? An elaborate but more conventional Christmas card would do the job better. As a desk-top accessory and talking-point? You might say, ‘Shall we make it April the second? According to Sheikh Yamani it’s a Tuesday …’ Leaving it open for your companion to say, ‘I think you mean the day before …’, not believing you until the card has been handed across, with a show of reluctance (he’s a close personal friend), and its full three-and-a-bit ounces weighed in the palm of the hand. Perhaps not even then.
Three-and-a-bit ounces! To put it in context, if this was luncheon meat, it would make a substantial portion for one.
As for why Dad was on the receiving end of a silver Christmas card from the Saudi oil minister, I have no idea. If he had been involved in international trade negotiations, I’m sure he would have said. He showed off this mega-trinket at the time, but was mysterious about why he had been sent it. He may have been as much in the dark as anyone else.
It’s possible that Sheikh Yamani simply carpet-bombed the pages of Who’s Who with his seasonal greetings. I wonder how many of the recipients responded in kind. It can’t quite have been the usual oh-God-they’ve-sent-us-one-we-have-to-send-them-one mid-December flurry. If there wasn’t a return address as such, there was always the Saudi embassy. I imagine various failed attempts at striking the right note, with drafts beginning ‘Dear Sheikh’ and ‘Dear Ahmad’ following each other into the waste-paper basket. Conversation, perhaps, about whether it wouldn’t really be more sensitive, more reciprocal, to send an Eid greeting (either Eid al-Fitr or Eid al-Adha) at the appropriate time instead, perhaps with a photograph of the family, even some of the children’s artwork, crayon sketch or potato-print. A bit pushy, maybe?
Silver Christmas card, kid gloves, cigar box. Not a bad haul from the trolley-dash of clearing the parental flat.
There are other less exotic relics in my keeping, mainly books. The non-legal books in the Gray’s Inn flat were either leather-bound and gold-tooled trophies (A Child’s Garden of Verses, Thy Servant a Dog) that we sons were given as children, or novels belonging to Sheila, either in Book Society editions or The World’s Classics imprint, with its pleasing solid though dinky format. I remember being shocked at the age of twelve or so by Kipling’s brutal realism in Thy Servant a Dog. ‘I found a Badness. I rolled in it. I liked it.’ — was there no limit to the filthiness of print? It seemed astonishing that such obscenity was felt suitable for leather covers, and put in the hands of children.
The book titles that most tantalized me in Sheila’s library took the form of phrases, like Audrey Erskine Lindop’s The Singer Not the Song (made into a famously campy film, with Dirk Bogarde very much leather-bound in the trouser department and verging on the gold-tooled) or Enid Bagnold’s The Loved and Envied, both of which I read in due course. The World’s Classics books, though they sat very satisfyingly in the hand, were heavier going, Lark Rise to Candleford, Esther Waters, New Grub Street. I don’t think I finished any of them.
Dad wasn’t a novel reader (if you except The Godfather), saying that he did too much reading in his work to enjoy it as a leisure activity, which is a perfectly reasonable attitude although it’s a distinction that wouldn’t actually occur to a book-lover.
His taste in reading matter off-duty ran to financial guides and investment magazines, some of them standard news-stand fare and some of them verging on the cabbalistic. I took just one of them from his bookshelves when we cleared the Gray’s Inn flat. It’s called The Campione Report, written by Dr W. G. Hill, JD, and published by Scope Books in 1989. I’ve only just now looked at it. As far as I can see, it might just as well be called Protocols of the Elders of Mammon.
The Campione Report announces sternly that it ‘may not be reproduced or copied in any way’ and is ‘for use of original buyer only’. Dad’s is ‘confidential registered copy’ no. 748. There’s a disclaimer on an inside page: ‘Whilst reliable sources have been sought out in compiling this book, neither the author, publisher nor distributor can accept any liability for the accuracy of its contents nor for the consequence of any reliance placed upon it.’
The main text is rather more seductive. ‘Tax havens are like beautiful women …’ purrs a passage headed ‘Is Campione your cup of tea?’. ‘Each one has different charms. Unfortunately, as with the ladies, they often offer a negative characteristic or two as some sort of price in return for enjoying their favours. The charms of Campione are many, the price is low, and the negative aspects are few …’
It certainly sounds lovely.
The artificial-sand beach with real palm trees, maintained beautifully at public expense, looks like a set from a Hawaiian travelogue. The churches and schools are absolutely gorgeous, and kept up like no others in Europe. Garbage is picked up free. Unfortunately, the locals still have to pay something for water, gas, electric and telephone. But these services are subsidised …
There’s no VAT, and foreigners pay no income tax. Visitors can renew their tourist status indefinitely, by walking across the street every three months, into another country, and will never be asked to register with the authorities.
Subsidized Shangri-la! VAT-free Brigadoon innocent of garbage! Where is this haven? Well, Campione turns out to be a rocky little enclave of Italy entirely inside Switzerland, a square mile huddled round a municipal casino — whose takings are what subsidizes local services. Population (in 1989) 3,000. Historically a place where monks trained local boys to become master masons and stone-cutters, and not exactly a haven, just a place where no-one can be bothered to collect tax, certainly not from foreigners. Campione offers all the benefits of Switzerland, including efficient communications and neutrality in wartime, and none of the disadvantages, such as military service (two months of active duty every summer, for life).
The philosophy advanced by Dr Hill is Permanent Tourism, though I wonder if Dad was tempted by any of his other publications. Permanent Tourism sounds like anything but fun. Wasn’t the Flying Dutchman a permanent tourist?
He didn’t consult me about money matters, and to be sure I would have had no economic knowledge to contribute, but there are other paths to prudence. I would have warned him against any financial scheme seemingly inspired by Passport to Pimlico.
The book’s intended effect of privileged information, oligarchic insiderdom, is immediately undone by the choice of material used for the cover. As Dad’s fingertips stroked this ‘leather-bound’ book of dreams, for which he had paid £50 — more than a pound a page! — didn’t he notice they were in fact meeting a texture reminiscent of the notebooks that were always offered as prizes by the Reader’s Digest, those abject booklets bound in ‘luxurious’ Kidron or Skivertex? This is a dream that crumbles at first touch. It dies under the fingers.
In real life Dad’s financial dealings were unsteady. After Black Monday in 1987 he asked if I could lend him some money. He had come unstuck with futures — now futures had come home to roost and were sharpening their claws on the present. He seemed only slightly embarrassed about it. No more than if he had run out of stamps, and needed to catch the post.