Sunday 16th May 2010

There’s so much to tell and there’s an undertow I can’t bring out yet. Poor Little Rich Gays are almost crushed under the weight of their own greatness and multiplying engagements.Poor Lord Arrowby is very pale and Angus Willis, the internationally-known food writer  – his fridge is jam-packed with M&S pizza dough.

But it’ll have to wait because:

On Friday, Frankie-Doreen Gunn and Giles Ullerston achieved the pinnacle of Poor Little Rich Gay life, although themselves only peripherally Poor Little Rich Gay, being actually straight and with off-spring. They gave a HOME CONCERT. A concert in the home. Of course it means, large entertaining area and grand piano. Actually they had a string quartet with added clarinet for one piece. Terribly top people, awfully good. Audience all classical music enthusiasts, only a few household names (usually at Frankie-Doreen and Giles’ everyone is a household name) , and Laura Malcolm, who became chilly after the Mendelssohn and was fetched a stunning shawl from Calcutta by Arjan Bose, the exquisite little spryte friend of Robert Nevil’s, currently doctoring at the clap clinic (but bored with it now) who lodges in Frankie-Doreen and Giles’ basement flat.

After the music there was a buffet on the ground floor, the concert having taken place below in, as it happens, a  Bruce MacBain-designed space. Oh yes, it all links together. Frankie-Doreen and Giles do not suffer from gay nerves. The previous night  they had given a huge drinks party for a business venture and strode straight on to a home concert with buffet, wines, seating, upheaval,  for 50 the following night. Frankie-Doreen holds down several jobs all of which involve reading 600 page documents in forty minutes then pledging £600,000 while keeping an eye on the pastry base she is pre-cooking in her mercifully eye-level oven.

What she would do without that eye-level…! The whole thing could come crashing down…

Arjan and I went back downstairs with our plates, because there was somewhere to sit, not joined by any of the others – the only gays in the village. We picked over our mutual frockage in great detail and found Topshop elements. Later we heaved upstairs. The only serious conversation I had was with a woman incidently shown in a very bad light in one of Laura Malcolm’s novels (didn’t help with the carrots). She admired my shoes, which were Prada from the Jan sale and I admired hers. She was worried though about her tangerine panels  and had thought of colouring them in different. She and Laura now on very good terms, probably better than before the affair of the novel.

Frankie-Doreen and Giles only need make a few adjustments to achieve a truly Poor Little Rich Gay home concert, should they ever venture again. I went to one once, in South Kensington, at the res of one Robert Venables QC. Now he’s got an organ in the library. A huge great built thing occupying the whole of one wall. He had someone famous and expensive in to thunder away on it. That’s of no matter. The crucial thing is the audience – it  was at least 25 per cent possibly diplomatic wife, foreign and bewildered, no idea why they were there, with pashminas, short skirts, lippie and jewellery, well-practiced in sitting bolt upright and keeping the mind empty while concert in progress. The other 75 per cent was an array of queenaria who would never knowingly self-book such a performance.