Belvedere Palace, Vienna

Source: Shutterstock

Neither London nor New York will be livable in ten years – only last Saturday, April 18, there were 6 shootings in the space of a few hours including a 15-year-old girl in the Bronx – and it isn’t even warm yet, when the bullets tend to fly most. In Brooklyn, houses are being sold for $6 million, when twenty years ago the price was less than 150,000 big ones. One house in Brooklyn heights has a $40 million price tag. 432 Park Avenue, I described last year as an undulating middle finger to good taste. It is 1,396 feet high, the brainchild of a horrible real estate shark I had the bad luck to go to school with. He was big and brash but wouldn’t go out for sports. His name is Harry Macklowe. I am sure some American citizens might end up owning an apartment there, but I am also certain they will be naturalised Americans, born under a somewhat bluer sky in Taiwan or India, or southern China.

London, of course, is no longer the grey, grimy city that I moved to forty years ago because it was fun. Friday nights one could get the best table anywhere as the Brits queued for hours on the M-4 to prove they were country gentry. No longer. The Gulf Ayrabs have descended like locust and there are no tables available anywhere anytime. Real estate prices, needless to say, are at nosebleed levels, and even the upper middle classes are moving out. London’s state schools cannot meet the standards of private ones – too many immigrant children who don’t speaka de English at home – which means only rich foreign people with children will be welcomed by London’s warm and extremely expensive embrace.

The solution to all this is easy: Move to Vienna or Warsaw or Krakow. Personally, and because of my advanced age, I will stick to the sinking ship. I’ve just bought myself a jewel on Park Avenue and once it’s finished I shall be receiving my refugee friends from London in the style they’re not accustomed to. In the meantime, Vienna beckons for my 80th birthday in two years. I had my seventieth in London. Do I go east or west for the eightieth? Vienna or New York? Schoenburg Palace or Palazzo Taki? It will most likely be Vienna, but if Greece is still afloat, it might also be a contender. My, my. What problems. Everyone at the Spectator and Takimag will be invited, and also many of its readers, if I make it to 80, that is.