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.