Delectations

Headline: aga to wed! Now that it’s actually happened, the newspapers seem a little piqued, as if finding the reality a limp anticlimax after such a long chase, and anyhow who is Lady Sarah Crichton-Stuart? Why couldn’t he have hooked up with Mia Farrow or Raquel Welch or someone, like his Daddy? But there he is, smiling his little-boy smile, the smile of one who has had too many mothers to placate, and saying: “We will probably spend our honeymoon on the Costa Smeralda.”

That place! With fantastic David Bailey creating girls in kooky gear against a background of desolate wind-carved rocks and all those fabulously exclusive people in frantic Pucci clothes from the yachts in the bay. Sardinia’s northeastern corner doesn’t have much else going for it: no natural supplies of water, few trees, fewer roads; lots of lizards. But the Mediterranean here is a particularly pellucid green, an emerald shield with a hundred-mile fringe of white beaches. Virgin land—unspoiled, as they say. Tourism obviously had to come. What surprised people was that it should come via His Highness the Aga Khan, Caliph and 49th Imam of the worldwide Ismaeli sect. God works in mysterious ways, but this was ridiculous. Thirty million bucks (for a start) to turn a wilderness into an island playpen for wealthy vulgarians with jet-set complexes? He must be out of his Oriental mind!

TS

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Tom Sage

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Headline: aga to wed! Now that it’s actually happened, the newspapers seem a little piqued, as if finding the reality a limp anticlimax after such a long chase, and anyhow who is Lady Sarah Crichton-Stuart? Why couldn’t he have hooked up with Mia Farrow or Raquel Welch or someone, like his Daddy? But there he is, smiling his little-boy smile, the smile of one who has had too many mothers to placate, and saying: “We will probably spend our honeymoon on the Costa Smeralda.”

That place! With fantastic David Bailey creating girls in kooky gear against a background of desolate wind-carved rocks and all those fabulously exclusive people in frantic Pucci clothes from the yachts in the bay. Sardinia’s northeastern corner doesn’t have much else going for it: no natural supplies of water, few trees, fewer roads; lots of lizards. But the Mediterranean here is a particularly pellucid green, an emerald shield with a hundred-mile fringe of white beaches. Virgin land—unspoiled, as they say. Tourism obviously had to come. What surprised people was that it should come via His Highness the Aga Khan, Caliph and 49th Imam of the worldwide Ismaeli sect. God works in mysterious ways, but this was ridiculous. Thirty million bucks (for a start) to turn a wilderness into an island playpen for wealthy vulgarians with jet-set complexes? He must be out of his Oriental mind!