It was a casual holiday conversation. Two ex-public schoolboys, both in their late 20s, were playing chess by the pool in their Vilebrequins. This time they did look up from the board. It's no big deal. My father's dad did it for him.
The English aristocracy has many bizarre rituals, their origins shrouded by the fogs of time. But one of the most surprising is the practice of upper-class fathers dispatching their quivering offspring to the kind of tutorial not offered at public school. At least, not in the classroom. From Victorian princes to Edwardian dukes and modern-day millionaires Tom Bower's most recent book on Richard Branson reveals that, while a pupil at Stowe, the businessman-to-be was sent off to see a prostitute by his father , the tradition has been going on for centuries, without shame and without ceremony, although the current generation are rather less receptive than their forebears.
Anyway, when the naked woman on stage asked the audience for a volunteer for the night, my father stood up and pointed at me with one hand, while raising my arm with the other.
I was pretty scared, so crossed my arms and stubbornly refused to stand up. I don't think we stayed much longer. Alex doesn't appear to have suffered any long-term damage and he shrugs off the experience. Another of my contemporaries, a year-old Old Stoic, was also offered the services of a hooker by his father, a rich British businessman, when he was 'around 15 or 16', and he accepted.
A decade on, rumours about his habit of summoning eastern European professionals to his Chelsea flat on Saturday nights rather suggest that his father's act sparked a lifelong penchant. Baron Lorne Thyssen-Bornemisza, the son of the late Swiss industrialist Hans, had a trickier time of it. She kept saying, "Are you finished yet? In some cases, sons aren't even informed of their father's intentions. An American tells me of a Lebanese family, where the father was concerned about the virginity of his 'shy' year-old son Kassim.
