Monday 29^th March 2010

Last Thursday to the Cobden Club, beside London’s Grand Union Canal, remote, grimy, but cutting edge, where Eddie is having another art show, almost exactly a week after the last one in Spitalfields.

Talk about creative!

Names, different ones, present. Eddie in tiny frockage, but his jacket longer than mine, we decide, and his hair more done. Mine is criticised as winged. Vibrant work, some of it only drying on the kitchen table the day before, apparently. But I don’t pay as much attention as I should. Miss Lallian Lark, of the Titlark Tours, is there!

The joy of being re-united. Miss Lallian was compere of unsurpassed bus outings many years ago, with her friend, Alberta Cowman-Parsons. Robert Nevil featured as Mrs Murphy, a grim Irishwoman, whose husband was buried at St Leonard’s Streatham and whose own vocation was a cleaning woman at the Design Centre in the Haymarket. Mrs Murphy went to the Royal Wedding of 1981, you know. She was fur-trimmed, even though it was summer. Eddie Sedgewick was her daughter, Concepta, an extraordinarily leggy slapper with a number of children in care. Titlark could pitch you up at a smart country house hotel for a banquet where the dainty first course pie-lettes turned out to contain only plastic shapes which had given off noxious fumes in the heating up. Or it might be Kensington Town Hall for a dinner dance. Here Mrs Murphy swayed awkwardly to Frank Sinatra with an unknown man and nearly married him. To this day, Robert Nevil could have been living in Kilburn, a latent tabloid head-line: ‘Hubby Never Knew Sicko Charlady Wife was a Man! ’

Instead of writing a history of the Pony Club known here and throughout the world.

Laura Malcolm and her art-student son, Kelm, very much taken up by Eddie Sedgewick (Poor Little Rich Gays must start investing in the young now) also there. Laura announces she’s on a diet. She will eat nothing for three months. But Kelm is peckish (growing boy, only 19). Laura fetches chips from the bar of the club, also a second, fatal, as it turns out, bottle of wine. We wrench the chips out of the poor young man’s mouth and into our own. I become incapable, quite drunk. Is Kelm getting fat? I’m absorbed by this question to the extent of prodding him in the chest, not an ideal approach if I’m to have more young people in my life.

He’s not getting fat, at least.