Two Chaps Talking

Aah Firenze! The Eternal City.

Millennia of stunning architecture, bella regazzi, warm weather and the finest food go a long way to mitigate their unfortunate passion for low-cut tasselled loafers but not quite, to my mind, far enough.

Still, if a fellow can't escape to the country in the heat of summer then the city of choice must be Florence.

All is utterly ticketty boo here in Blighty. I was at a wedding this weekend - an exceding posh one somewhere near Winchester - which gave me a chance to observe the right sort at play. I've long held that the Upper classes are congenitally incapable of dancing and this event bore out my thesis.

I recall attending a Hunt Ball at Bryanston in my youth where I was first able to observe the phenomenon. Of course there was the usual excrable choice of music which would have ensured that James Brown danced like a white man but this alone couldn't explain the variety of half-baked, Dad-dancing that was going on. The chaps seemed to favour an arythmic mooch with uncoordinated shrugs and occasional spastic arm movement. The girls varied between synchronised group shuffling and, from the more histrionic, the kind of arm waving, hair tossing abandon that betokened sexual excess in a 1928 silent porn loop.

A disconsolate couple who had taken a salsa class in a vain attempt to reerect the limp stump of their relationship mournfully phoned in the tired ritual in one corner while an arseholed minor Hon. in an inherited kilt cleared a long thin strip of the floor along which he energetically cantered back and forth until he vomited his entire payload of Baileys and rubbery chicken into a rented Draecaena palm.

The staff, dragged from the surrounding villages for the event, wore borrowed nylon shirts, unsuitable hair and detached looks of arctic loathing. They mumbled amongst themselves, picked at their alarming crops of acne and looked, for all the World, as if they dreamed of Guillotines.

Fortunately, this weekend's bash was a little lighter in tone but still featured some terrifically stilted terpsichorean stylings. My favourite was an elderly chap, must have been all of seventy, in a lumpy off-the-peg of an absurd beige. He was wearing bullying glasses - the kind with bad repairs, sat-on frames, greasy lenses and with obvious deposits of dead skin cells around the nose pieces that would have made a devout and asthmatic member of the Chess Club want to bully him - beige socks and slip on shoes. All of his movement seemed to be backward from the vertical plane of his torso. He pawed at the ground in a repulsive parody of a rutting bull. His spine arched and his arms waved in the air. Imagine a charismatic cleric with Huntington's Chorea pulled through the air at incredible speed by a ligature at the umbilicus. All this, he performed around his small wife, like a squid worrying a whelk.

I pointed this entertaining vision out to the Memsahib who examined him for a moment then said, without apparent irony, "He's the top economist at King's. I think he got a Nobel Prize".

It was that sort of party.

Last night was something altogether different. As the Mem and are away for a couple of days my chum T took me out drinking to celebrate my birthday. We ended up with his friends, a smallish harem of TV girls, in a bar in Soho. By half past eight one of them had me pinned in a corner and was talking me through her latest idea.

I'm sure America hasn't escaped 'Reality TV'. Dear God, was there ever more of a misnomer? If eight semi-human members of the lower orders, locked in a house and prostituting themselves before the cameras for fifteen minutes of notoriety bears any resemblance at all to reality I'm going to neck my own weight in veterinary grade Ketamine and go out in blaze of psychosis.

This particular format featured a disfunctional couple (He slaps her around, apparently) who are separated for several weeks and kept in some luxury before being brought back together to see if they can make a go of it.

I confess I was utterly appalled. It's hard to imagine where one goes from here. Someone recently told me there was an American show where vagrants fought each other for cash in front of a baying mass of rednecks. I'm not sure if it was a joke or a social comment.

If people are making money out of this I must be in the wrong game.

Here's my pitch.

Micro-celebrities stand in a barrel of warm faeces and rats, tearing chunks out of their flesh with rusty nail clippers, weeping to camera and confessing to an entire recovered memory of being locked under the stairs and diddled by an uncle. While this is going on, lap dancers and dwarves wrestle for prizes in a pool of bat jism.

What should we call it?

T