Only last week, at my friend Stanley Weiss's house, I was sitting next to Roman Polanski's beautiful young wife and having a very good time. Roman is a very old friend and I was particularly happy to see him and Emmanuelle. Then I saw my wife making a sort of face I'm not used to seeing. She looked not best pleased. The man next to her, it seems, asked her what my political persuasion was. She answered that I am a conservative, meaning I don't believe in unnecessary change. He obviously thought I was some kind of Nazi. “How can you be married to a conservative?” he asked her. A rude remark to someone he had only just met.

Mind you, he later apologised, which I guess made it alright, but still, manners are not his strong point. He turned out to be a Canadian, which is par for the course. What I like about Canada is Al Capone's definition of that distant and cold country. When Capone was told by his lawyers that the Feds had him cold on tax evasion, and that he should skip town, he asked where he should go. “Try Canada,” he was advised. “Canada?” asked the gangster, “I don't even know what street's that's on.

I suppose when people party as much as we do, things tend to get out of hand. About fifteen years ago, up at the Eagle Club, I was in my cups and worried about a deadline when I thought I noticed something. One of the children playing below the terrace looked to me the spitting image of Angelo, the then Eagle maitre-d'. So when I got back down I sat on the typewriter and wrote a ridiculous story about how 90 percent of Eagle Club members’ children looked like they had been fathered by Angelo. The piece caused quite a stir. A few bores took umbrage, but cooler heads prevailed and it was soon forgotten. It was a joke that sort of backfired. I guess some people are not quite sure what their wives are up to while they're down the valley slaving away.

My favourite joke gone bad is that of the famous London hostess Mrs Corrigan. She was an absurd Mrs Malaprop-like figure, a terrific social climber who always wore terrible wigs. But she did employ the best chef in London, which helped persuade the then Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, to attend one of her dinners. Once seated, a horrified Mrs Corrigan noticed that her chief butler was completely drunk. She asked for a pad and wrote him a short note: “You're drunk. Leave the room at once.” The butler took the note, read it, and then staggered over to the Prince of Wales and handed it to him signalling it came from the hostess. Furious, he made his excuses and left before the first course. End of climb, as far as poor Mrs Corrigan was concerned.

And a very good lesson for us. Never, but never insult or be rude to staff. They have funny ways of paying one back. The recently diseased Leona Helmsley, a terrible woman who treated flunkeys and working people appallingly, once gave a large dinner for fat cats she was doing real estate business with. After the first course, soup, the waiters and butlers failed to appear. She rang and rang, then finally got up and went to the kitchen to investigate the delay. There was no one. Only a note pasted on the wall: “We have all quit, but before leaving we all peed in the soup.”

Have a good autumn and see you, I hope, in winter.

Taki Theodoracopulos, better known as Taki, is a journalist and writer, living in Gstaad, London, and New York. His column ‘High Life’ has appeared in The Spectator for the past 25 years, and he has also written for National Review, the London Sunday Times, Esquire, Vanity Fair, the New York Press, and Quest Magazine, among others. In 2002 Taki founded The American Conservative magazine with Pat Buchanan and Scott McConnell. He is also publisher of the British magazine Right Now! and has been writing for GstaadLife since its first season in 2003/4. More of his musings can be found here and on his website at www.takimag.com.