Saturday 4th October 2025

As you know there is no official summer holiday these days with the exception of this year. Anthony Mottram (who sold his ‘consultancy’ for ££££££££ ) and Prince Dmitri took a villa in Cefalonia. I, Adrian Edge, managed to get there by Ryan Air.

Exiting the machine at Cefalonia, I encountered those Gays that go to fun clubs for instant fun. They were trolling the other way to board for London. They’d been visiting Ed Jasper, the bedlinen expert, and Roland Mainflower, who’ve got a branch in the north of the island. Terraces, maids, antique flower pots and a pool.

News of my arrival was flashed instantly. But it was too far to go since I had no vehicle.

Cefalonia was earthquaked in 1954 (or thereabouts). Very little of it was left. The villages are pink and new. The scenery is glorious.

The villa was classic gay in one way – entirely on its own. Half way up a mountain in wild terrain. Tremendous views. Within less gay. Oh dear, the floor tiles. One longed to re-do. And a toilet in the drawing room.

The main thing was the cats. Anthony Mottram would make cat noises every morning. Without fail the cats would appear. The black and white cat was bolder. The poor stripey one hardly got any of the food. When I tried to make cat noises, the more forward cat replied in the most off-hand manner. It could hardly to bothered.

But I thought my cat noises were quite good.

Otherwise sheep went by every evening at six pm. They had bells round their necks, so it was a musical event. There was no shepherd. They removed themselves elsewhere of their own accord.

There was a theme among the younger people of going to the neighbouring island, which is called Zakynthos. I suppose it’s inevitable that if you’re on one island, you long to get to another one within view … but out of reach, as it happened.

Now, as the autumn leaves are hounded by wind in the grey streets of London, how magical it was that we were there. Every evening we descended to the beach. The villa pool we never entered. The emptying beach as the shadows lengthened, a few elderly British people marooned on the sand, catching the final rays, the hope of paradise fading but not gone …

Tuesday 23rd September 2025

To the Garden Museum Literary Festival, this year at Iford Manor.

There was a theme of ladies-in-waiting.

This broadcast is also How England Really is.

I, Adrian Edge, missed last year’s at Sezincote. The year before, at Parham, Amanda and Stoker didn’t come. But the Riblats did.

For only £150, you are elevated to the Riblats or Amanda and Stoker.

This year, we saw Stoker in the middle of the field, near the lunch tent. Royston King was on him at once. Not ‘Your Grace! Your Grace!’ as at Houghton, in 2019. But ‘Stoker, Stoker.’ ‘Hello, I’m Stoker.’ ‘Has Amanda come?’ ‘Did you bring your driver?’ ‘No, I came by taxi.’ At lunch, Stoker was sitting alone. It was self-collect from a buffet, seating at long tables. He had a notebook and an iPhone. Our direction was clear. What an opportunity. Almost unbelievable. The 12th Duke of Devonshire. Quite alone. The field completely clear. Nothing to stop us. But on the way we came upon our favourite Museum Director lunching. ‘I think Stoker’s happy on his own,’ he said.

So we went no further.

All the same – the elevation.

The pre-lunch talk was Thomas Pakenham, in fact Long Longford, on trees. He’s 92. Many interesting facts not known to me, Adrian Edge, previously – such as that Magnolia Campbelli was in fact discovered by Hooker who named it after Archibald Campbell, the administrator of his plant-hunting expedition. The compare of the talk was called Campbell-Preston. Afterwards I asked her if by any chance she was in Waiting to Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. ‘That was my mother-in-law,’ she said.

By the lunch buffet I ran into Tom Stuart Smith. ‘Hello, I’m Adrian Edge.’ ‘Yes, I know you,’ he goes. Blinding. Tom Stuart Smith knows me, Adrian Edge.

Anyway, the thing is, his grandmother was Lizzie Motion, who was in Waiting to Her Late Majesty Queen Mary.

So that made a theme of Ladies-in-Waiting.

There was a tour of the Garden then a talk with Tom Stuart Smith (which was heaven). So many confessions! Such as how he couldn’t resist the yellow azaleas at Crocus for his Chelsea Garden which cost him Best in Show because the self-appointed ‘brief’ was ‘drought-resistant’ therefore azaleas impossible.

Stoker was in the front row for the talk, busy writing in his notebook.

There was a tour of the garden. Then I had to leave by car for the Gay Mother’s.

I’d always thought Iford was in the middle of Bradford-on-Avon. It isn’t. Its glory is the setting … in a vale, no other houses except the manor, a fine Palladian facade but a gentleman’s house, not a mansion, beside a lane and a river, unchanged for centuries. Somehow extraordinary that such a facade would occur in the middle of nowhere like that. Sir Harold Peto, I think, put a grand Italian statue on the bridge before the house.

The garden is architectural, by Sir Harold Peto. Edwardian. Quite nice. Except the Japanese garden, horrid and damp. It’s got an Appian Way, an Etruscan colonnade and a Florentine cloister, all cleverly inserted into a smallish space. But no flowers to speak of. Nor shrubs of great interest. But that will change.

Sunday 21st September 2025

On the way I, Adrian Edge, ran into Harry Rollo and Mercury Mr Kitten at the traffic lights. They were returning from a private outing to the Jarman House on the sand dunes.

Only some of the most well-known people in their fields – at the traffic lights.

I couldn’t stop long because due at the Hall. Our seats were in a box. I assumed the allocation was random but maybe not.

The boxes at the Hall are for twelve not known to each other. Royston King and I, Adrian Edge, took our seats. It was to be the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra – very, very high.

Little did we know what glory was to ensue. There were other people in the box but unknowns. To the side though, there was a stirring, a sense of presence which rapidly materialised. Royston at once was wondering whether to hail… the Controller of Radio 3, whose drinks party we had attended at the previous Prom. He was right next to us. Royston didn’t wonder for long. The megaphone was out.

Others were taking their seats. Among them Matthew Bonne Femme, the gardener, superb in florals as was his husband. But too far away to get the attention of..

We had to wait until the interval, where outside in the corridor there was a flurry. Matthew Bonne Femme remembered me. I had to shout Royston King down to get across to him about the Crape Myrtle. Royston had started up about the Memorial Garden for Queen Elizabeth 11 in Regent’s Park. The Controller of Radio 3 was trotting on the spot. The corridor behind the boxes – it could be a hotel but exclusive. Only box-holders present. The murmur was – the Chairman of the BBC was somewhere, in one of the boxes. But which one?

We conducted a sweep. Royston longed to crash but veered. Many box doors open, but no Chair of the BBC.

It was only on the way back that through an open door we saw the Controller of Radio 3 making a speech to a small ring of persons who applauded. Then somebody said, ‘Ah, Royston!’

And we were in. The occupants of the Chair’s box had never known such a whirl, such a thrill of the not planned-for. The former Director General was there. Others we’d met at Petworth. Trustees, Committee members. Drinks, crisps. You’d have thought we were radical drag artists or extreme LGBTQ+ extremists such was the excitement, the diversion from their set agendas. The Chair was bouncing up and down as Royston gave feedback on his Select Committee appearance that day. ‘I’m a good foil to the Director-General,’ he repeated, ‘I’m a good foil…at last I’m a foil…’

He couldn’t have loved it more.

We returned to our box for the Tchaikovsky – this was just about the most prestigious of the Proms. The whirly bits of the Tchai – you just couldn’t believe it. Was it ever so played in live performance? How could they do it?

On the way out we saw Lady Susan Hussey half-way through a swing door. The BBC, it seemed, had taken at least three boxes, a carpet of boxes with guests.

What an occasion. What a miracle.

3rd September 2025

The Chateau fragment is booming: soon it will be six-bedroom, five toilet, and with an arse-kitchen. The side shed has been knocked down and the premises is surging on the left flank. Lamprey de Hautbois , the best-born builder ever, is personally tiling the new roof. He is now a Kardashian of the Landed Gentry after starring in a heart-wrenching misery TV documentary on streaming TV about the breaking-up of his family home, bought in the 60s from the sale of a Jan Eyck.

Matt Driver had interrupted his Norman sojourn to visit his mother in England, so joined my car at Newhaven for the return trip. Near Rouen, he said I lacked an official sticker re: emissions of the car. I’d never heard of such a thing and am not impressed with the recent history of most European countries as police states. But Matt Driver was hours peering at his phone trying to determine the extent of the exclusion zone around Rouen. We had to go round a long way.

Matt Driver once shaped the taste of Nations, if not the world. Now, although on the pay-roll, he sits all day with nothing to do, like those sisters in Gormenghast who were forgotten in some far-flung corner of the castle. Years later, rotted purple fragments of their frocks were found, the only evidence of their existence.

But Matt Driver is on that neighbourhood committee; the friends of the Common outside his London windows. Laura Malcolm was saying it was too much for him. He shouldn’t be laying awake at night. But no, he’s ousted the malcontents and formed a new committee.

Laura Malcolm did a Welcome Dinner, including self-sugared lavender sprigs. Her menu-ing detail is amazing. There are always three or four salsas and at least two garnishes. I said she ought to have a Home-making Show, like Megane. Matt Driver said it would be quite something with the flies buzzing round, the battered batterie de cuisine, the debris accumulating on the floor and Laura’s special way of man-handling the food – she uses her hands to smear salsa verde like it was still the Middle Ages and possibly even mayonnaise too.

The Norman Poor Little Rich Gays are otherwise going strong if perhaps ploughing fewer furrows than before. The Lairdess is doing less lurid innuendo sugar-coated with cut-glass vowels. Instead every 48 hours, her mouth opens and out comes the name of that Welsh town that’s the longest name of any town ever.

Moira McMatron described how in childhood, owing to Catholicism, she imagined her soul as a long piece gradually getting blacker and blacker, the black spots merging into one another. But at Confession she had to rack her brains to think of anything to confess.

This year, her frockage acquired new heights. Like Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother she was never seen before noon when she would appear completely finished. I really thought it was Royalty. She’s using monobloc colour like Royalty, each day a different colour, and hung about with jewellery to such an extend you can’t tell where it’s coming from – just a blaze of gold and diamonds.

We had the Laird’s quiz as always, a work of genius. But Laura Malcolm protested that too many marks were allotted to the false answers round, allowing the men’s team to draw a little nearer to the women’s. The Laird had a breakdown and was on the point of packing up all his projectors, sound machines and scoring systems. He’s an unusual man. Normally he sticks strictly to facts. But if certain songs are played he begins randomly to weep. Nobody really knows why but he’s famous for it.

The Laird’s major theme this year was the superiority of wire corkscrews over foil. I never even knew there was either foil or wire, let alone which is best. There seem to have been fewer developments on the weed-killer front, which is another of the Laird’s interests. The odd thing is he doesn’t touch a drop, doesn’t drink at all and isn’t a gardener. A new line for him though was as cow-whisperer. He was out in the field, divining which was the matriarch as a prelude to bonding more fully with the herd.

One day the water had to be switched off because, after showering I found the shower wouldn’t shut off. I was blamed, of course. There’s a brutal side to the Norman experience. The plumber couldn’t come at once because it was Ferragosto. A nightmare regime ensued where Laura Malcolm would switch on the water supply for strictly 15 minute slots only. All toiletting and toilette work had be carried out in that time and at no other. The beginning and end of the water period was marked by the tremendous barked command of Laura Malcolm, such as might be heard on the parade ground at the Knightsbridge barracks.

After 36 hours of this the plumber came. In the meantime Matt Driver touched up a little chip in the varnish on the lav seat which I pointed out to him. But there’s no doubt, behind every man who amounts to anything, there lies a formidable woman.

Tuesday 2nd September 2025

Mostly, developments are not good. 

Back in March Royston King and I thought to have an outing to Windsor. When we got there, it was closed. Neither of us had thought to check in advance. 

Instead we lunched in a low-slung pub right by the top of the Long Walk. Royston was recognised and had a huge confab with the landlord about getting on in life from modest beginnings. Royston was pleased with his progress to being a landlord at 42. 

Then we set out to walk the entire length of the Long Walk, all the way to the statue of George 111. You can see it far in the distance from the start. 

George 111 was so darling, like a nice old farmer.  

It was marvellous. Hardly anybody was there. It might as well have been the 18^th century. Huge deer park with that burnished late winter look. For hours, that statue didn’t seem to get any nearer, until at last it creaked up on us and we were there. 

Some American students appeared. They had little idea where they were or why. Nor how lucky for them that they’d bumped into a world-class figure like Royston King. He boomed at them the nearness of London and the Royal influence. The landscape showed how England really is  – Windsor, then some trees which was Richmond, a Royal park, and up on a hill (maybe Harrow) where once some Royal regiments had been. 

They asked for guidance. Did we recommend Dover for their last day, which was the next day? The previous two days had been their first days. We did not recommend Dover. We thanked them for their loyalty in coming to Windsor despite the War of Independence and subsequent independence, all forgotten now. 

I had blisters from having fashion footwear for a 5-mile walk. 

More recently I bought a box of chalk on Amazon. The idea was to draw on the pavement outside my residence lively illustrations trying to stop dogs from lifting their legs right outside the home. A huge trough of chalk arrived, not the small pack intended. For a long  time I couldn’t think where to put it. Then I had a brainwave of startling brilliance for its storage. So brilliant that, when I came to look for it again, I couldn’t find it anywhere. 

I went through every cupboard and wardrobe, howling in mounting agony. I just could not believe it. I longed to die. The suffering was far worse that Ariadne’s on Naxos. I went away to the Gay Mother’s with the chalk unfound. Upon return, the whole thing started over again. I was facing the demolition of the house. Until, on the fourth day, I looked in the bottom of a wardrobe where I’d looked very thoroughly before. There it was – the box of chalk. 

I phoned Val in Moscova, Hastings. He said he had no conversation. But he had. He’s doing that Japanese thing where you draw attention to a repair. When porcelain is mended, you put gold along the crack. It’s got a name, like sushi, or origami or umani. But this is a sofa. A new piece is going to be let in to cover a bare patch. Val was wondering what glue to use, if any. We recalled the glues of our youth – darling Gloy, Copidex and Uhu. There was another that came in a pot with a spreader and smelled of almonds. But Val seemed never to have known of its existence. 

So there was conversation after all. 

In late July we went to Windsor to make up for the previous visit. This time it was open. We saw the tomb of Her Late Majesty, in a tiny sunken chapel of St George’s , with her mother and father and husband and Margaret. Already a place of veneration and pilgrimage, fully connected and subsumed into the tradition of other such places – the place of martyrdom of St Thomas a Becket at Canterbury, the vault at St Peter’s Rome where St Peter founded the Church and the sacred spot where the Virgin appeared at Lourdes. 

The state rooms we were just a wheeny bit bored by, knowing them so well. And the crimson and green drawing rooms still not open.  So we’ll have to go again in the autumn. In the café, Royston was not inclined to award OBEs to the staff. He insisted on walking to the Farm Shop which is about 40 miles away. Then on from there to some obscure train station. We were seen slogging along a busy road for miles and miles. Absolutely nobody else on foot. Luckily though not recognised. Or if recognised, nobody blabbed to the Daily Mail. The publicity would have been dreadful. 

What is utterly superb though is this new concept: a sugar kitchen. As you know, a kitchen is usually not self-funding. Which is rather the point. But it has come to our attention that, even if on another continent, a sugar kitchen is manifest. A privately rich kitchen not yet thirty. Also with high-paying employment and very handsome. What could be better? 

Poor Little Rich Gays nearing the grave can rest in peace at last. 

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 £££££.