Luxury Briefing.

You have to picture the scene: the Oliver Messel room on top of The Dorchester; an abundance of good Champagne; a pleasing air of optimism because the BA-Iberia merger had just been announced and this seems full of promising benefits and I will soon be happily full of fino and chorizo.  So, very festively, Willie Walsh invited his guests to put their business cards into what I think was a goldfish bowl although I do not know where they found one of those on Park Lane. As he immersed his hand to execute the raffle, I was deep in conversation with the gorgeous Victoria Mather, the Catherine Deneuve of travel writers, and not taking much notice. Giggly delight was mixed with exquisite embarrassment when Willie announced me as the winner of two tickets on BA’s new all-Club Class New York service from London City Airport. Plus a few nights in The Dorchester Collection’s New York Palace Hotel. Winning things is hugely amusing especially when the prize is so interesting. A 32 sleeper-seat Airbus is the way I want to fly because I want better travel, not cheaper travel. Seems people agree because the new route is a sell-out. But Willie Walsh did tell me he thinks Michael O’Leary does a brilliant job of managing customer expectations: he tells them Ryanair will give them a horrible experience and he doesn’t care. They are never disappointed.

My winnings in life’s lottery include property in the least fashionable part of London. Indeed, some describe it as a senseless killing area. We look aspirationally to our neighbour Battersea just as Battersea looks longingly at its transpontine neighbour Chelsea.  So we are getting very excited about developments on the South Bank. At last, after several superlatively unrealistic (bonkers) proposals, there appears to be a sensible scheme for the redevelopment of the landmark Power Station. The US Embassy is moving onto a site whose neighbours include a Ready Mixed Concrete depot and the CWU Sorting Office. Expect a halo effect, a mirror-image of the Af-Pak adventure. Most interesting, near the old Price’s Candle Factory, there is a new hotel. Any hotel is a bit of a rarity in south London where the social arts are not so refined and leisure pursuits are focused on shopping at Lidl and drawing benefits. But a luxury hotel is noteworthy. The all new Hotel Rafayel is a bogglingly unlikely and very audacious addition to the vast Ballardian newtopia of ziggurat apartment blocks in SW11. There are wonderful river views, an intelligent environmental policy, vast rooms, a bakery in the lobby. Best of all, the developer says he has ambitions that the hotel will begin a process that turns Battersea riverside into London’s rive gauche. So here is real ambition. True, Wandsworth Road cannot yet be mistaken for the Boulevard Saint-Germain, but reach should exceed grasp.  Or what is heaven for? Put it this way: a fine hotel revived St Mawes.

Like winning, I don’t do runes or haruscopy, but I am very interested in signs-of-the-times. At the beginning of December the V&A’s magnificent new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries opened. The buzz of real passion in the guests was tangible: it was not polite approval, but an almost feral engagement with the exhibits. What so excited people? I think it was the reality of access to material of moral authenticity and genuine physical quality. Significantly, I did not find any leading architects or artists among the deliriously appreciative crowds. Something was wrong.

My best line of the season comes from Bill Muirhead of M&C. Saatchi. Describing a much-Michelined and faintly ridiculous restaurant, he said, “it’s the sort of place they put gravy under the meat.”

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