PERCHED in front of a roaring log fire in my sitting room in Claridge's hotel last week (a favour granted to me in return for fine words yet to be written), I read in the newspaper of Lord Charteris, former private secretary to the Queen, who had described the Duchess of York as a 'vulgarian'. 'Vulgar, vulgar, vulgar...,' he repeated sadly, in case the equally coarse readership had not caught the meaning of that quaintly archaic noun.
Looking across Claridge's Tartan Suite, a fabulously plush and panelled replica of a Scottish baronial hunting lodge, I felt assured they could never call me that. Only two antlered deer heads and a bust of Robbie Burns gave me chills of self doubt.
I returned to Lord Charteris who, although he retired as private secretary in 1977 when the duchess was still giving the last burnish to her vulgarity at finishing school, had remained a close adviser to the monarch. Now the mental hand brake is slipping and the memory is meandering downhill, out of control.
His collision with Fergie sponsored a week of speculation in Britain as to the nature of vulgarity. Columnists could not get their computers switched on fast enough to say the whole of the royal family was vulgar anyway; and writer and on-and-off feminist, Germaine Greer, some of whose written views had been as entertainingly rough as a duck's backside, pointed a finger at the Queen for not being a patron of the arts and collecting glass animals instead.
At the mention of glass animals, it did not take more than a couple of electronic brain pulses to get me to Hong Kong, the one place in the world where glass animals, sometimes of titanic proportions, are the centre pieces of major department stores. In Hong Kong stores, 'vulgarians' are thought to be a Chinese ethnic minority group and the premises are swept for good taste every morning by store security.
Fixing the antlered deer's glass eye, I thought of the nature of vulgarity in Hong Kong. The Independent newspaper in London went so far as to write an editorial on the subject, titled 'Three cheers for vulgarity!', associating it with economic vigour and social vivacity so anyone who feels they recognise themselves in this context should not take it personally, let alone legally.
Local Hong Kong businessmen are always alleged to be vulgar, which fits the Independent thesis but since they are so publicly enigmatic, favouring dark suits and dark cars, this is always difficult to prove. Li Ka-shing had the veil tweaked down slightly by a report about a burglary at his house last year where the intruder could only get as far as putting the wind up the servants because their quarters were locked off from the main house from the other side until breakfast time.