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?