Wish you were being drizzled on: last week’s sun ruined my Riviera holiday

Well, as weeks go, that really should have been as close to perfect as it’s possible to imagine. It began with a giant party in Siena at one of those houses that I thought only really existed in advertisements for Cinzano. Even Kate Moss was there.

Then I pottered up the Riviera to stay with friends in Portofino before heading on down, for no particular reason, to St Tropez. After that I did a bit of summer glacier skiing in Les Deux Alpes and then drove a Bugatti into Turin for a bowl of kidneys and much too much wine.

There wasn’t a single view on the entire trip that was anything less than magical. There wasn’t one person I met whom I didn’t like. There was no unpleasantness of any kind. And yet the whole thing was spoiled just a tiny bit by constant reports that Britain was basking under the sort of summer skies it hasn’t seen for more than forty years.

‘Bugger,’ I thought, when I consulted my Instagram feed every morning and saw everyone I knew at home frolicking about in ponds. And lots of shots of hot dogs. ‘Bugger and blast.’

The weather on my trip was cloudless. The skies were constantly blue. And the thermometer was hovering in what those of us who can remember the summer of 1976 call ‘the mid-eighties’. But it’s hard to enjoy weather such as this when you know that the people back home are enjoying it too. I suspect I’m not alone in this.

When we come back from a holiday, radiating wellness, we like people to say, ‘Ooh, have you been away?’ We don’t want to come back, after spending thousands of pounds, to find that they are browner than we are.

This troubles me. God enthusiasts are forever telling us that the human being is fundamentally good and charitable and kind. But how can this be so if we are saddened to hear that other people are enjoying a bit of luck with the weather?

I wonder. Do very rich people resent those who win the lottery and become very rich themselves? Were we all a bit happy last week to hear Boris Becker has money troubles? And do we rejoice silently when the Mail Online brings news of a former supermodel’s cellulite?

I recently ran into some people at an airport who said they were friendly with a chap I’d been at school with. Back then he was captain of everything, had a triangular torso and always went off with the girl I’d spent all night dazzling with my wit. ‘How is he?’ I asked. ‘He’s fat,’ they said. ‘How fat?’ I asked with a hint of glee in my voice. ‘Well, he weighs eighteen stone,’ they said. And I’m sorry but that made me happy for a month.

All of which brings me to a new residential development not far from where I live in west London. Designed to be a place where thrusting City boys can spend evenings watching pornography and eating takeaway food, it’s ‘That’ll do’ architecture at its most uninspiring.

But last week it became a lifeboat. The City of London Corporation has done some kind of deal with the developer and ended up with sixty-eight flats that can be used, for ever, by those who lost everything in the Grenfell Tower blaze.

On the face of it, this is perfect. Those poor families have a brand-new place to call home and it’s just a spit away from where their children go to school. The developer has apparently sold the flats at cost, but you can be assured that its next application to put up a ho-hum block will be passed very quickly by planners. So it’s happy too. And Kensington and Chelsea Council is delighted because it’s a one-fell-swoop solution to a problem that two weeks ago seemed insurmountable. So that’s all lovely.

Or is it? Because in the past few months, people have been moving into that development. I see their expensive light fittings and curtains as I drive by. They’ve obviously coughed up God knows how many millions to live in a place that they thought would be filled with peace and quiet. And now it turns out they’re going to be sharing it with people – many of whom have been refugees twice – from the other side of the tracks. Yup, the American Psycho will be living cheek by jowl with Mohamed from Somalia.

One day soon, and I can pretty much guarantee this, one of the City boys will complain. He’ll say he doesn’t like his new neighbour’s cooking smells or that he found a used hypodermic needle on the landing. And when he does, he is going to have about twenty-five tons of brown stuff emptied on his head for being a callous, Tory-voting, selfish, thoughtless, heartless man-bastard.

We will all nod, of course, and gnash our teeth and say, ‘Yes. He is all of those things.’ But actually he’s only doing exactly what I did as I sat in a harbour café in Portofino and read that Britain had just enjoyed its hottest summer’s day since whenever the last one was.

The fact is that the God enthusiasts are wrong. Human beings are not fundamentally nice. We are fundamentally horrible. Put a video of a cat having a nice snooze on YouTube and no one will watch it. Put up a video of a cat falling off a washing machine and it’ll get 8 trillion views.

The Grenfell Tower fire brought out the best in us. We rallied round and donated our trousers. It’s the same story when we hear about children drowning in the Mediterranean or dying of starvation in Africa. We buy the charity records and we pull the right faces.

But then we go back to our ordinary, bitter lives, where we resent the success, the wealth, the beauty or even the good fortune of others.

Don’t agree? Well, just remember that when you read earlier about my week in Italy and France, you thought – and don’t deny it – ‘You lucky sod.’

25 June 2017