We ventured into Suffolk for Benton End. The Duchess Throckmorton arranged it. Without her, perhaps, we’d never do anything. It was a private visit of course.

Beforehand we lunched with a Greek millionaire friend of the Duchess’s, who did that thing only country people do – having to lunch a whole gang of people they don’t know. The home was more than hygienic and the lunch excellent, not scratch, as well it might have been.

Nearly everybody else I know with a country house – I have to bring my own cleaning equipment.

Everywhere we motored the Duchess had got connections – an old sister of Cecil King’s for instance, long dead. Cecil King, you will remember, owned the Mirror and conspired with Lord Mountbatten to bring down the Socialist government of the 1960s in a military coup.

The Duchess did, however, refuse the Gay Mother’s mink. This was earlier. In February. She had a huge family wedding at the Fitzrovia chapel. We thought a mink stole would lift any outfit. It was dragged out of the Gay Mother’s chest and photographed for approval. But no, it wasn’t to be.

Arrival at Benton End took place. It was very hot and the place was rather drought-stricken. It’s being restored, garden and house, as an educational centre. The claim to fame is that Cedric Morris lived there and had a gay life plus an art school attended by Dame Ethel Bellows among others. He was both a gardener and a painter.

The house has some good old parts. There was an antique sink where Dame Bellows must have washed her early brushes. But really too many rooms Victorianised and a gloomy outlook of laurels presumably planted to screen the road outside. The garden a large walled area; horticultural archaeology, you might call it, in progress to attempt to recover bulbs and bits of iris actually grown by Cedric Morris. He died in the 60s and the property has been in other hands ever since. Could be nice… but the road running right down one side not enchanting.

The rest of the place is semi-wild with a huge white rambling rose planted by Cedric Morris the main feature.

You want to wish these ‘projects’ well of course.

Royston King paid a State visit to the Far West. He insisted on strawberries being washed and ordered chutney to be brought to be table. I said, ‘It’s not a restaurant, you know’, a phrase I find myself deploying more frequently with aging guests.

As members of the public, we visited Buckland Abbey, home of Sir Francis Drake. In the dining room, Royston King cast doubt on their Rembrandt, which indeed did not appear to belong to the house. The guide’s look was of a volcano about to erupt. At the same time, she was a pile of ashes. In the hall, though, Royston King praised the Tudor tiles and the dedication of the guide in that room to whom he awarded an MBE or appeared to.

I’ve known Buckland Abbey all my life. We are often on the private side as it was in those days at children’s tea parties and later drinks parties. Now the private house has fallen to the National Trust as a holiday rental. I remember Mrs Rodd (who the Gay Mother said was a Courtauld but later said wasn’t) presiding at tea in that house and telling one of her grandchildren not to lick the spoon and put it back. She wasn’t frightening. In those days upper class country women were distinguished by their brogues and headscarves, with an otherwise brown and navy colour scheme. She self-shopped though and her Austin Cambridge was often seen outside the shops.

The public part of the Abbey has been fiddled about with over the years. But is never quite satisfactory. It ought to be marvellous, so medieval, but somehow there have been so many layers of history – first of all the monks, then Grenville, then Drake (or the other way round) – they’ve wiped each other out.

In the afternoon we motored on to Cotehele, great Tudor home of the Mount Edgecombes, now National Trust. I paid an unfortunate visit there in October 2020. Masks, distance, house shut up, fear and dread incubated by the State stalking the land.

What a mercy I returned and that memory was erased. Cotehele is enchanting. Buried deep in the Tamar Valley and buried too in time, although modern Calstock can be seen from the terrace. An intact medieval ensemble outside and within shadowy tapestry hung rooms with marvellous slanting aqueous light from mullion windows. But these are actually a fantasy recreation of a Jacobean interior done in the 18th century when someone had the wit to buy up yards and yards of tapestry and numerous other kinds of fabric ‘work’ which were going cheap, being out of fashion.

But it seems so perfectly of its time and you are plunged back and cocooned. It helps that the Jacobethan style allows for that seemingly more random accumulation of items which brings a house alive, rather than the acutely staged decor of later periods.

Thursday 14th August 2025

Access almost didn’t happen at all.

My Official Car is tended in a biblical wasteland at Park Royale. To get out, I must negotiate heaps of wrecked vehicles, fork-lift trucks manoeuvring mysterious bundles, white vans trying to go in all directions in the cement alleys of the cursed place. There are no women there. What goes on in all those tumbledown sheds crammed together? How many diverse people are trapped there, unable to get out?

So finally back on the legitimate road with my Official Car amazingly waved through the MOT procedure, an orange light comes on on the dashboard. Nothing for it but to plunge back in to the Gormenghast tangle. Amazed faces of the diverse garage workers as I rock back up. I was invited to wait in the drawing room of the garage while my machine was taken away for assessment.

Time was running out. How to convey in time Royston King to lunch in Hampshire and then to the Royal Albert Hall? The drawing room of the garage unbelievable compared to Sandringham.

But by great good mercy my vehicle is brought back in the nick of time, the orange light wiped out. No further treatment required.

It was only on arrival at the Royal Albert Hall that things started to go badly wrong. There was an unexpected onslaught of Poor Little Rich Gays present. Nobody’s office had been in touch with anybody else’s. Rufus Pitman, Reggie Cresswell and Finn Magnus, the hot boy doc (looking incredibly fresh and burnished) are a party. Royston King veered off to join another doctor, from Belgravia. They were to be received in the Comptroller of Radio 3’s box. I was joined in the Hall by Prince Dmitri.

So we were variously configured but still incredibly great.

Prince Dmitri and I took our seats in the stalls. There was to be a Prom. An Hungarian orch: Beethoven’s 7th Symphony and then Bluebeard’s Castle.

We couldn’t but notice Reggie Cresswell, somehow separated from Rufus and Dr Finn, stranded in the aisle, unable to find them. In the stalls of the Hall, all faces vanish into a vast wash of faces. Even prominent people could not be there. Reggie in the aisle recalled how at the afterparty for Gianni Versace’s funeral in Milan, Princess Diana stood all alone with nobody to talk to. The most famous woman in the world (apart from Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth 11) had nobody to talk to.

In the end, Reggie had to opt for the nearest vacant seat, hoping not to be pitched out in the middle of the work.

But why oh why were Royston and the Belgravia doctor coming into the stalls? I saw them funnelling in with the general. What had happened to the Comptroller of Radio 3’s box? Or indeed to the Comptroller of Radio 3 himself?

The tickets may have been honorific … but Wot, no box?

In the end, Reggie survived in the seat that wasn’t his. Beethoven’s 7th Symphony – well, I couldn’t get excited about it. As soon as it was over, it was blindingly obvious where Rufus and Dr Finn were. For some reason, Beethoven’s 7th Symphony had to be got out of the way, before they could be revealed, like a penance… now through a glass darkly, but then face to face.

Bluebeard’s Castle was more riveting than Beethoven’s 7th Symphony.

I’ve heard that for next week’s Prom, Royston King has secured an invitation to the Comptroller of Radio 3’s drinks party beforehand and even, maybe, in the interval as well.

For the avoidance of doubt, we’re self-ticketing on this occasion.

Tuesday 12th August 2025

Roughly speaking there are engagements and there is home life. Home life takes place in various homes, increasingly at the Gay Mother’s.

Motoring between the two grows more and more tormenting. One little mistake, you are grabbed and throttled, have to pay millions. Two more tiny lapses and you’re abolished altogether from the roads.

Engagements thrash and writhe in the memory and might even get away altogether. Did the engagement even take place? Let alone what happened…

There was a Cecil Beaton Exhib at the Garden Museum. Tiny things to look at. The interior at Reddish now a dim recollection in black and white from Country Life 1957. Reddish is special to us because Anthony Mottram lived opposite it in childhood and once saw Garbo walking by. From the start, we were at the core. But never got in. It was done like a stage set, it would seem. In the village rumour said that within it was grubby and founded on cardboard and ply-wood.

Cecil was a nightmare naturally. In the exhib are his typed notes on a production of Turandot he was designing. Terrible tussle over head-dresses. Whole side of typing. But he was photographed triumphant and fully homosexual holding aloft other head-dresses that had been approved.

His life was decor.

I was at the private breakfast for the Summer Exhib at the Royal Academy. Dame Anna Ford has had enough of the herbarium at Kew. She’s writing to the Pope instead. I think she said the Pope could see to it that everybody in the world got the soap they needed.

Royston King pointed out the wild rows of red dots (equaling sales) of pictures of cats, flowers and dogs as opposed to the severe absence of red dots of any kind beside the works the private curator considered important. One was a drawer screwed sideways to the wall with a black hand painted in it (£23,000). Others showed oppression, wrongs of Empire, racism, environmental damage – all the usual things.

Other engagements have included:

Hampton Court Palace – tour of the gardens with the head gardener and an awards ceremony. Royston King was given a Life-time Achievement Award by the Royal Parks Guild. The only person who rose to the occasion in terms of frock, hat, bag and gloves was the toilet attendant at Bushey Park who was given an award for exceptional devotion to her toilet-users.

Three visits to Glyndebourniana – the first was Parsifal and beforehand I thought I would die with the stain and worry – as already mentioned. But somehow you get used to it. The final visit for Kata K one seemed to sail through. But I’m glad Glyndebourne is closed for this year. There’s always the hope that one won’t be spared for next year and therefore spared the agony of transporting to Glyndebourne half one’s household goods, a 4-course picnic, 2 hours in the car both ways, then de-picnicking the next day.

There’s also the matter of the missing tablecloth. STILL not found. I reported it left behind within hours but Glyndebourniana couldn’t find it. I phoned 4 times. If not even Glyndebourniana can find an antique damask tablecloth, what hope is there?

Tuesday 5th August 2025

I snagged my cardy on the Tudor House – when was that? Fifteen years ago at least. Then the Tudor House was new. Newly re-Tudorised by Angus Willis’s genius at the cost of the mental wards of Hastings being piled to the rafters with all Hastings’ builders. Out with the Aga, all mod cons in fact, out with Smallbone of Devizes. In were huge open fireplaces, stone floors, bakelite sockets and switches, furniture chewed by the rats and pecked by the hens of Eastern Europe, the ‘London’ gas cooker – the full Tudor effect. When the public were admitted at Christmas for the Christmas Tudor Show, some of them trembled and cowered on arrival. They really thought they’d been tardis-ed.

Estate agents once were asked to value the house on TV. One of them said it was uninhabitable. There was a staircase, of a kind, but you still had to self-haul on a rope. Getting down was worse.

It was eerie. The wholeness of the decor, utterly complete.

This was the greatest new interior in this country since the War. Why was it not preserved for the Nation?

On Monday I went down to Battle to collect my Tudor House remnant. There’d been an auction. I was online. I had to have a Tudor relic. I’d have liked the Tudor Georgian wing arm chair – but where to put it? In the event I clutched at the 18th century Tudor Hungarian peg table.

At this table, in the Tudor House, I had once had an exhibition lunch with Genevieve Suzy, head of Dainty Lady TV, lunching before the public who came in on a paying-basis for the Christmas Tudor opening rather as Raine Spencer would elaborately take tea at Althorp with Johnie in full public view to complete for them the ‘stately home experience’. And before that, there was the chimpanzees’ tea party of course.

The Battle auction house is a former cinema. Glorious artefacts from the Tudor House were piled up at the back, awaiting collection by their new owners.

Tudor now entirely over.

The pieces strewn far and wide, perhaps to become Tudor again. Who knows?

After collection, I went round to the humble cott in a wood where Angus Willis actually lives. He never lived in Tudor and Fergus Strachan wouldn’t go there because no TV allowed. Angus has a diet where he doesn’t eat anything except in the evening. So no lunch. He was on a 30s settee. The drawing room does need re-doing. On the settee, he totted up his recent Clarice Cliff purchases. I did think £12,000 might have been spent on having a toilet seat that doesn’t fall down during use – and perhaps a new drawing room carpet. The dining room has been re-done. A brick floor was exposed with ravines and crevices. You’d never get a trolley over it. There’s an enormous model yacht parked on one side.

Angus has got a Regency House now, as well as a shop. So decor will go on. There will be more decor. The simple cott, though. I don’t think it will ever be done. Each evening, it seems, it’s necessary retreat to somewhere that isn’t done.

Saturday 19th July 2025

June was Glyndebourniana twice. Before Parsifal I nearly died with the strain. A Wagner picnic is something else, like the normal Glyndebourniana agony x 6.

Then I left my tablecloth behind and still they can’t find it. It must have got mixed up with the ones the ‘dining team’ provide. I suppose nobody is left alive who can tell the difference between double damask and shiny polyester.

The Marriage of Figaro went off more smoothly. I did go to Ottolenghi for the main course – damp, cold salmon with a vague curry aura.

For The Merry Widow at Holland Park Opera I did Tom Parker Bowles’s Royal Chicken Salad, regularly gobbled by Queen Victoria apparently. Quite nice.

There’s been my National Garden Scheme Garden Opening – 10 lunched in the drawing room and 6 took a seated tea in the dining room. Joshua Baring couldn’t stay. 124 members of the public were admitted to the garden with Robert Nevil and the Maharajah on the door and Joshua Baring kettling in the kitchen. Royston King was also present in the drawing room.

The Ragged School staged their piano festival again with those heroes of the pandemic response (i.e. giving concerts), Samson Tsoy, Pavel Kolesnikov and Elisabeth Leonskaja. Samson and Pavel have taken to having huge flounced frockage. It was a Schubert evening.

At the Royal Academy, the private breakfast was for the Summer Exhibition. Dame Anna Ford was present. She said she was going to write to the Pope; the Herbarium at Kew she’s had enough of, although by all accounts it will not move to Reading. Previously Royston King had attended a dinner at Kew. At the mention of Dame Anna Ford the whole place blew up.

I’m come to the content of these events another time.

Trooping the Colour though… Royston King got VIP seats. We were seated with the Minister of Defence, the Head of the Italian Airforce, the Head of the French Army, the Chief Constable of the British Transport Police and other Greatnesses. The Royal Family were sublime. Her Majesty is now a shape, as the late Queen was. You’d know it was her from miles away. Royston King didn’t think much of her having to hold onto her hat in the wind. But she must have an enormous hat. The King was totally the King. Driving up in his carriage, he was a ringer for George 111.

It had rained the night before. The scene was radiant. The best bit is when the horses canter round the parade ground at break-neck speed and how they play their instruments while mounted and keep time.

Afterwards the husband of the Chief Constable of British Transport Police, a detective, launched into a blow-by-blow of the Hampstead Rapist which ought to have had a trigger warning.

In the background, I nearly forgot to say, all the time has been the re-colouring of the kitchen floor. Four boards needed to be sanded and start again. I thought I would surely be able to match the colour which I mixed myself 30 years ago. After 14 goes, I thought it would just have to do. But at the garden opening, Joshua Baring said the old colour was excellent and the new one not. Luckily he knows a colour expert. I can see it’s going to cost £££££.

Sunday 6th July 2025

Two have died and been spared the rising tide of Socialism.

Not that Manny Maude would have minded the rising tide. Sir Trerew Vyvan Trerew on the other hand…

I wasn’t planning to attend Manny Maude’s Mem but Rufus Pitman urged my presence and we lunched beforehand. Harry Rollo and Reggie Cresswell were also in the party. Harry has developed a new approach to ‘plant-based’… cake is plant-based, he says, sugar is plant-based. Why did nobody say this before? Only a genius can unearth the obvious when it’s been buried.

Manny Maude is important. At his lunches and dinners in the 1980s names began: Beryl Bainbridge was spoken of but never materialised. Her matching pair, Bernice Rubens, on the other hand did. So did Josceline Dimbleby and Tristam Powell. Jane Grigson and Maria Aitken hovered convincingly in the background.

Most important, Manndy Maude was the path for me, Adrian Edge, to Rufus Pitman and thence to Harry Rollo and Reggie Cresswell. There might have been other paths or there might not.

Once I took New Year on a regular basis with Manny Maude and his later husband, Denzel Lomax, who started out a semi-kitchen but ended a mogul. I was always round. But from 1996, after I’d moved to the other side of London and grown nearer and nearer the Throne, a frost descended. Manny Maude’s mother had been in service at Buckingham Palace. Royalty were not top of the list. Happily though, at Frankie Wainwright’s funeral in January 2024, I had one final jolly confab (as it evolved) with Manny Maude on the topic of Barbara Cartland.

Manny was a lasting writer. His mem was a big affair although outfits were deliberately reduced to a minimum. Within minutes of opening, the C word had been uttered. The Vicar, pinnioned in full view on a dias, had no choice but to roar. Then it happened again. So in closing remarks, the Vicar had to say it himself, as well as disclose the possession of a husband. Mega-stars did readings, famous musicians played music. One of the readings was about a terrible fart-gas incident in Rome following artichokes. Ethel Bellows, the artist, read out all the preposterous made up names Manny had put on the envelopes of the letters he’d sent her – inevitably blowing up her credibility with the postman and her wider neighbourhood, not that she could give a damn. They went something like: ‘General Leading Lesbian, Director of Lesbian Services West Norfolk Area’ or ‘Major-General Massive Lesbian, Lesbian Brigade, Salvation Army Lesbian Division’. She said that if ever one mentioned one’s own health, Manny changed the subject.

Manny was a bit of a nightmare. But great. His mem was a noble effort to stamp him forever on eternity but really there is no need… he’s already fully stamped on.

Sir Trerew, like Manny, was taken before Christmas. He’d already been mem-ed once at the cathedral of the far far West, so this was the London branch. Bang opposite the Academy for ease to access to the after-function. A sea of navy in the church, all the Royal Academy ladies of Rutland Gate and Ennismore Gardens suddenly out of their wheelchairs and clucking forth, even without sticks. Sir Trerew had been a stunner in his day, known as ‘Sir Pash’. Later his knack was for getting money out of people. Huge projects. Everybody said, ‘It’s impossible’. But he did it. To me, Adrian Edge, he always seemed somewhat vague. He never quite knew who one was, despite the Gay Granny’s best friend having been one of his tenants and his father’s before that, and his mother having lunched with the Gay Granny and the Gay Mother in the 1930s, which has recently come to light, as the Gay Mother has new memories. Maybe that was part of the perf. Anyway, he only had to murmur and wallets burst open, millions pouring out.

Aunt Lavinia was also on friendly terms. In December 2019, after the Messiah at San Paolo di Londra, Aunt Lavinia boarded a bus for Fulham and discovered Sir Trerew and Lady Trerew on the bottom deck (they were returning from a City dinner). The three of them yacked away until Chelsea which was the T’s stop.

The King and Queen, the Glou and Princess Anne were represented. Sir Trerew was only 85. So mem goers not severely ancient, just quietly turning. Still smart and neat in navy. Their like will not be seen again. Afterwards all three rooms at the front of the Royal Academy packed. Wine only. The new Sir Trerew a little the worse for wear by the end. All the past Presidents of the RHS (as are living), Christies, the National Trust (of 20 years ago), the Royal Academy greatnesses – taking one last look back.

Saturday 7th June 2025

Raining – but heating on at 5? Is that right for June?

Robert Nevil and the Maharajah seem to have turned the corner. Earlier in the week, Sir Squirrel came in with his menacing folder containing designs for Robert Nevil’s catafalque – which wasn’t encouraging. I feared it was going to be the demise of poor Prince Eddy all over again. Now a triumphant drive to San Paolo di Londra for a Service of National Thanksgiving for the Recovery of Robert Nevil and the Maharajah looks more than likely.

The Duchess Throckmorton (relatively new in the circle but it turns out we’ve always known her and people she knows) went in and tested them for that thing. But it wasn’t that thing.

There’s so much going on. Including a new concept – a Sugar Kitchen. I know it sounds a contradiction in terms. But one exists. One’s been found. A much younger man of private means as well as highly placed as to profession united with an older man over twice his age. A Sugar Kitchen.

I went to Prague for a week last month. Princess Alexandra said to Anthony Mottram (‘consultant’ of Prague but now sold up) in the box at the Royal Albert Hall, ‘The family love Prague.’ This was 20 years ago.

We rarely left the Museum apartment. It was a steady mitel-European life of steady routine with a German emphasis. Anthony Mottram doesn’t eat before 2. After 2 he has cakes, flatbreads, breads stuffed with cheese from Georgina, cold meats and hot meats. At 5 it’s time to go to a gymnasium to sit in a false bicycle for 40 minutes while reading a kindle. After that there is an interlude in Starbucks for tea and teacakes. Then back to the Museum apartment for music practice following which it is time for the restaurant. Once the restaurant is over, it’s Netflix in the private small drawing room on the upper floor of the Museum apartment. Whenever in the small private drawing room, I always made a point of saying, ‘How thankful you must be for this small private drawing room.’ The main salon which occupies almost all of the lower floor (although the hotel bedroom is also there) is quite terrifying. So vast. You couldn’t sit in it alone or even as a pair. So where would Anthony Mottram be without that small private drawing room? Although an oddity of it is the ficus tree in a pot which is now so enormous it’s difficult to get into the room.

Prague was once famous for its dustbins, which were displayed in rows outside historic buildings. Now it is incredibly tidy. A huge amount of gardening has gone on. No litter, not even in back alleys. It is almost a German city as it once was.

There was been another improvement. As you know Anthony Mottram almost single-handedly transformed the old Eastern bloc with his enterprise. But one thing stubbornly wouldn’t shift: always hot milk brought with tea. Anthony Mottram would have to say, ‘Tea.. with COLD milk.’ Sometimes even the direct command was ignored or not understand. But now, at last, the message has got through, the penny has dropped. No hot milk with tea. It’s not even thought of. Nothing need be said.

It just shows: if you keep on about something for 35 years, eventually a Nation will grasp it. The great ship of state will turn and get it right.

Monday 2nd June 2025

Robert Nevill isn’t well for his birthday. Developed a temperature overnight. Yesterday his cough was getting better.

The Gay Mother said that Lady Maristow was locked out of the kitchen. This was before she was married. In the night she got up. She fancied hot milk. But Cook had locked the kitchen. She must have been on an engagement visit to what would become the marital home in due course. Around about 1936.

Funny this has never been mentioned before. We used to encounter Lady Maristow on the platform at the station. She always mentioned how much the Gay Mother’s Mother, the Gay Granny, did in the county.

She maintained a Cook all her born days. We can only hope she was not locked out permanently.

It’s the same story with Mr Gandhi. ‘Oh, I saw Mr Gandhi from the top of a bus in Knightsbridge,’ the Gay Mother announced a few months ago. First I’d heard of it. ‘He had wrapped round what looked like a rather dirty piece of cloth.’ This would have been his self-spun fabric by which he set such store. Self-spun fabric was the future of India, he believed.

The Gay Mother lunched out in April. Amongst the neighbours a mania for wild garlic had developed. One had boiled bundles of it as if it were greens. ‘I don’t think the Gay Mother liked it,’ this neighbour said to me. Once she’d gone the GM said, ‘I don’t think I was obliged to eat it. It wasn’t very nice.’

Also disliked are the Fine Cheese Company of Bath’s biscuits for cheese. Peter’s Yard (the ones that are so artisanal they can gouge a groove in your mouth) have been discontinued in the cheese shop and replaced with the products of the Fine Cheese Company of Bath. ‘To the compost heap with them,’ the Gay Mother ordered. In fact they were displayed in her kitchen for some weeks, rather like the Head of Oliver Cromwell on a pike on the roof of Westminster Hall all those years as an example. ‘If you mess with the Monarchy, this is what will happen to you.’ Quite right too.

Possibly the biscuits in question were the vegan option, hence ‘like sawdust’. Other options might be possible from the Fine Cheese Company of Bath, including ‘Bath Squares’ thought to resemble the true Bath Oliver, which has been abolished.

Tuesday 20th May 2025

It was more than just the Royal Car at the gate, the Standard even when hanging limp on the bonnet so absolutely giving the Presence, as the Weeds came forward to receive Their Majesties.

That was at 4.30. From 10.15 I’d been on my feet , in an outfit, touring, circling the Dog Garden but really whirring – all the different levels of celebrity. For Prue Leith, Dame Stedman, Myleene Klass, Monty, lunch in the Newt VIP Suite, as for us also, Royston’s guests, Queen Lahoura, Dame Bennett (who once ruled our screens) and Sir Almond Pearl, from the Royal Household. For Fiona Bruce, on the other hand, the rope was lifted for the private drinks party on the Royal Horticultural Society’s lawn. The President’s lunch was the greatest rarity at lunchtime. Sir Nick Knowles of DIY TV was elevated to a speaking role, so we heard from Royston afterwards. But later there were tea parties and drinks receptions, one of those receptions the greatest of all.

Dame Bennett, released from months of solitary ill health, at once resumed the world stage: financial advice for Queen Lahoura, Sir Knowles she told not to let ‘Hello!’ indoors, he having sold his forthcoming wedding to that publication, and to the world she declared that children must be spared the Internet. She refused all requests to be photographed, massively incog, not fit to be seen etc… even some poor Gay whose mother was a fan.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking life at the Top is all canapés and champagne. Not a bit of it. The committees, the millions to be spent, or not spent, the intrigues, the Trustees, the missing Chairs… ‘Dame Agnes Bazouka!’ one of Royston’s guests who’d lunched with the President suddenly cried out as we roamed the show afterwards. Dame Agnes was halted in her path and Royston began a massive address about the memorial to Her Late Majesty currently being tendered for in St James’s Park. Dame Agnes is on the selection committee, you see. She turned out to be American and like Bette Davis: ‘See here,’ she cut in. ‘You keep going on about a monument. I’m telling you now, we’re not doin’ no monument.’ Even Royston was silenced, for a moment.

Then there’s Vincent Square, and the case of the missing Chair… not to mention another scandal that can’t be mentioned. All these balls being juggled at once. ‘Something must be done.’ ‘We can’t have this… we can’t have that… we don’t want him… we don’t want her… ‘

It’s thrilling but shattering.

Royston was greeted in person by the Mayor, who stood up for him. I thought the Mayor looked as if he’d lost too much weight.

At 3.30 even the greatest celebrities must leave. Spaniels appear, looking for bombs. And then at 4.30, the Royal persons and their suites. A hush over the ground but also the crude scramble and appetite of the photographers. They came round a corner and we were three feet from the Persons. The nearer they are the less real they seem. You cannot believe it’s them. The Queen carries no handbag. They went different ways.

So the King progressed up Main Avenue, the still everlasting presence in the midst of a manic mill of security men and press, the legendary figure we’ve known all our lives. Royston and I retreated in the Main Tent and were chatting to a nice country man who supplies leading trees and taught His Majesty grafting, when, without warning, the King was upon us. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘indeed.’ ‘This is Adrian Edge,’ Royston said. With the suddenness, all procedure evap. I dipped but didn’t curtsey fully. Whether I spoke or not I couldn’t say. The actual King was shaking my hand. V. firm handshake. He was five minutes or more in confab with the tree man about some oaks that were doing well in one place but not another and had the plum trees arrived at Balmoral? The Weeds, behind, were looking desperate because of the schedule. Finally His Majesty wafted forward as only Royalty can do.

Delirious we left the tent and found an elderly Royal Duke wandering about by himself. ‘Which is your stand?’ he said to Royston. Then there was David Beckham, stationed outside the Highgrove shop. Dazed, I assumed he had somehow become Royalty too, or had always been. It was quite normal. He was a strange colour, a little green, feeling of a drawn-on face, very black narrow eyes. A bit frightening. Odd woven, organic frock.

We had to get to the Reception, the greatest of the Receptions, before Royalty. The canapés had been upped, I can tell you. The Duch of Glou took a glass this year. At one moment she wandered the party unaccompanied. The Duke of Glou slumped on a chair with the Michaels of Kent and their friend who had an arrangement of small plasters on the top of his head. Really it could have been any pensioners’ jolly. The Michaels had to be buggied at the show this year. The Duch of Glou is exquisite. Perfectly formed and frocked to a dream. Last year she had six gold necklaces. The King and Queen arrived and there was a reception line and curtseying. It was quite crowded. Procedure dissolved. Her Majesty was going great guns with someone in a corner, like any party goer. But she’s the Queen. Edinburgh was stood with his brother the King. It was mainly Edinburgh talking as it was when he was with the Duch of Glou. They all seemed to know one another. Eugenie kissed the King then curtseyed. Just at the point when a danger was growing that they might lose their magic, the hot boy equerry was marshalling and departure was looming. Royalty are exceptionally good at leaving. They leave but remain, unlike most people who can’t leave and grind on to dust. Royalty evaporate but there’s no door slamming and really it’s more like what the Ascension of the Virgin must have been like.

Royston and I didn’t have a moment. The Gala reception for paying commerce followed immediately. We insisted on champagne from a stall and ate their canapés. Too late did we see the sign that said, ‘Guests of Chase Manhattan (or whatever)only’.

Nobody was at the Reception except the 3000 people who’d paid £700 each to attend. Royston had confab about Vincent Square and truly we might have drilled to Australia. It was 9.30 before we were in the street and there was Lord Snowdon mounting a cycle. He wants some new gates put to make a vista up to Kensington Palace. He explained with photos on his phone. I said, ‘They could be memorial gates to Your Late Mother.’ Then, oh no, St James’ Park… my feet couldn’t have been more killing me after 11 hours on them. ‘What do you think about the plans… your Late Aunt?’ Royston was off. ‘Can’t you get through to the King?’ ‘Sir Squirrel came to see me…’ ‘If he doesn’t like it we’ll all get to hear about it…’ Finally Lord Snowdon cycled away – no lights.

Monday 12th May 2025

In a moment of madness I booked the Garden Museum Exclusive Tour of Sandringham with the Head Gardener. There would have been a ticket for Royston King but he wasn’t quick enough – held up in meetings in the upper corridors of power. The tour sold out at once. So he said the Head Gardener could be dispensed with, only the King would do .. why bother with Sandringham?

I over-nighted with Herbert Morrison and St Anselm at Cromer. They did 3 courses. There were no outrages. Herbert Morrison has acquired some kind of mechanical violin, called a Nyckleharpa, from Glasgow at great expense. I undertook to fetch it from Ladywell whence it had been brought by another friend from Scotland. From there I motored it to Cromer. St Anselm said now he faced the horror of it being played which began at once. Otherwise the talk was of aged relatives and their carry-on.

The next morning arrival at Sandringham took place at 9.30. Glorious sunshine. Tour members elderly, some gays, deeply anonymous. No self-introducing. It would all have been different if Royston King had been there. I lack the killer instinct. One lady claimed to know what the weather is going to be all summer. We went through the wall into Sandringham demesne. The last time I was there ( seven or eight years ago) this was an experience almost of terror, a sudden plunge back to 1880, the hideous house lowering over a vast lawn, an aura of conifers and rhododendrons, a sinister lake where a recently drowned governess might have haunted had there been a recently drowned governess.

Now all transformed. Sensational. The lawn turned into a rough meadow, huge bulb planting and masses of acers (both Japanese and other). The ugly house blotted out, a wonderful verdant scene, enclosed by the existing trees, the essence of what a country house should be, where the outside world is shut out and within is a better place.

We went on the topiary garden right in front of the house. I’d no idea it would be so huge. One acre. Next to it is a sunken maze . The King at the last minute said, ‘ How about a stepped bank?’ Or rather he used a technical term which the Head Gardener had to pretend to understand. Making the stepped bank on three sides of a kind of basin in which the maze sits turned out to be quite complicated. They had to get their set-squares and slide-rules out.

Then we were shown a rockery that had sprung into being in the past ten days.

Well, it’s a great kingly scheme. Only a king could have done it – and all within 3 years. But poignant. Lilibet rather pushed out of the way. She’d never have spent millions on a topiary garden. The King must have been waiting to pounce. Now, though, we have important new horticulture, the most important new garden design likely to occur in the Kingdom for some time.

Luncheon was given in a Women’s Institute type hall. There was some banter. Those who’d been annoying on the tour with their attention-seeking non-questions turned out to be bearable. A man retired from banking told one of those stories in which somebody like Mark Carney or Keir Starmer had been a tea-boy when first encountered by him or somebody he knew millennia ago. It might have been true. Gays slightly gravitated and more so during the tour of the house. Now there’s a jigsaw puzzle Their Majesties are supposedly in medias res with laid out in the saloon (which is really the hall). In the darling drawing room I said to the apparent kitchen (or perhaps son) of a man in his 50s, ‘It’s all so unbelievably granny and bedroom.’ He had on a frock-type outfit in black and was more than up to my remark. We agreed that the panelling needed to be picked out in different shades, not just flat slamming cream.

In the dining room the guide said he thought the King was going to strip off all Queen Mary’s green paint (also flat, the panelling not picked out) and go back to the oak. We agreed that the nightmare of Nitromors didn’t bear thinking about. It’s possible that the King thinks so too. Two tables have been stripped but no more.

In the old reign such free and easy talk about paint finishes would never have been allowed. All Lilibet’s hard-wearing upholstery from John Lewis has been abolished.

Outside on the entrance front there’s some really frightful public park planting and new peculiar garden seats in odd colours. The husband or father of the young man in the partial frock was depressed by them. His theme of not liking gathered momentum, careered rather, until he was saying, ‘What’s the point of Sandringham? It’s time to get rid of it.’

It was a moment of madness.