Thursday 20th May 2010

It all started last Thursday, this tugging undertow I keep on mentioning. Since then, by bizarre coincidence or not, other things have happened which tug too, in a similar way.

Poor Little Rich Gays are really rather driven, you see. Have you heard of W.H.Auden?  He was a poet. He wrote a poem on the death of Yeats, who was another poet. It goes: ‘Mad Ireland hurt him into Poetry.’

Well, something has hurt Poor Little Rich Gays into being Poor Little Rich. They’ve been hounded, gashed, crushed into greatness.

But we wouldn’t have it any other way. Warped, maimed but outstanding to be preferred any day over steady, reliable and happy. Do try it if you are a normal gay or straight. Do become Poor Little Rich.

Even if there’s a price to pay.

First of all, I heard of a long-established couple barely on speaking terms ever since some silly woman asked them if they were forming a Civil Partnership: ‘I couldn’t marry anyone who actually likes Emma Bridgewater pottery.’ The one who said this was trying to be deflecting and flippant.

Civil Partnership?  All very well as a business arrangement. But why not be married to several people or on a rotating basis? You can be married but not having sex or even living together. Did you know that? You can be married without ever having had sex, in fact.  This couple have been bickering away and occasionally trying to strangle each other for twenty years. Why not carry on? Why let the horrible spectre of Civil Partnership intrude?  Were it not for Civil Partnership, would Anthony Mottram and I have fallen out? Wouldn’t we still be nagging away at each other and trotting off on happy holidays as a threesome, the third being Vladimir Alexov, Mottram’s boyfriend, blessed with only 24 years?

Then, last Thursday, Angus Willis phoned up, from the top of his game as a food writer and photographer. Just finished photographing pizzas for M & S, to be used on packaging. But feeling low, troubled by Poor Little Rich Gay life, also thinking of forming a Civil with Fergus Strachan after twenty-two years together. I go round and he makes consoling pizza with the M & S ingredients of which he’s got several tons. We fall to recalling our days at Prep and Public, which are boarding schools whence, if you were English and middle class, it was  normal, in the 60s and 70s, to be sent at the age of seven. It occurs to me how many Poor Little Rich Gays are Prep and Public, hence perhaps fiercely independent, bitches for achievement above all else, but wounded, not really right at all. Plus being gay and rich, of course.

We agree that going back for the second term of Prep was the worst. When you knew…. Starting was just bewildering. After Christmas 1965, I took my little tent into the woods, an outdoor mode in winter being preferable to that awful school. But I only got as far as a bit beyond the Titballs’ (yes, they really were called that) chicken shed and the poor gay mother came to fetch me back in her Jaeger coat. So much suffering all round. Angus said that his father wept putting him on the plane from Germany. What did they think they were doing?

Finally on Sunday, Lord Arrowby murmurs in my ear after the lunch. We’d been talking about how he’d been Head Boy of his Prep earlier. Anyway, can’t bear running the country. Wants to live in an ashram in India. Well, he couldn’t, of course. One of the things he seems to deal with is the aging population. He couldn’t just abandon them or it. Must be a temporary set-back. Exhausted after the election and those shattering days before the coalition formed.

All the same, telling, don’t you think?

There you are! The Poor Little Rich Gays