Poor Little Rich Gays Reach New Highs and Lows in Brussels «

Poor Little Rich Gays Reach New Highs and Lows in Brussels

Sunday 13^th June 2010

I’m on the Eurostar returning from Brussels. In Leisure Class, knocked out by leisure of on-board meal service but still basking.

I’ve been with my old friend, Conor Cadoux, from the rare and exceptional South African branch of the Poor Little Rich Gays. He was once in the gutter, although always very grandly qualified, in Earls Courtsy, living on benefits. But now he’s huge in the EU, advising the Commissioners, the whole future of Europe in his hands. Hence in Brussels.

Conor’s Poor Little Rich Gay tendencies could only be glimpsed years ago. Once I encountered him in Harrods on the first day of the sale demanding that all the non-sale goods be fetched from the backroom. Otherwise he scarcely shopped, was unpropertied,un-carred and uninvolved with decor or bathroom products .. . But now he’s risen to good dinner service, grand parquet floors, antique drinks cupboard in the salon acquired in a sell-off from the Bank of England, art, wines, champagne, decanters and muttering to himself about the cleaner’s lack of dusting.

I met Conor at St Pancras on Friday (he was over, seeing the Government) and yes, dear Nicholas Taudevin (see Comments: ‘I watch Valentino Doc on TV’) we penetrated the Business Premier Lounge. There were rock stars in there, but we didn’t know who they were. So they might not have been Rock Stars, just yobs. Lovely hush, staff every three feet and running buffet. Awful shock having to leave it and briefly traverse the common parts of the station before gaining the Leisure Class carriage.

On Saturday we shopped minutely and in agony at the one outstanding butchers. Brussels has been the making of Conor. It is a grey, anonymous city and dog-eared, to be ignored. The only hope is to gild it with fine shopping. A charming young man dined. He and Conor then went out, Conor returning at 9 this morning with a different man who insisted he was English but neither spoke it nor looked it. I managed to catch Conor alone in the bedroom corridor. ’Get rid of him,’ I said, ‘he’s a serial killer.’ Conor said, ‘Who is this madman? Listen to him. He’s talking to himself.’ It was true. He was. He didn’t leave but stayed to lunch. They drank whisky and kept talking their shirts off and putting them back on again while churning round some interminable political discussion: ‘You Belgians should be grateful.’ ‘The EU is the making of you.’ ‘You’re a Bolshevik!’ Nothing the other man said made any sense at all. Conor got grander and grander. He said his grandmother had lured him into the kitchen when he was 10 and confided that she was on an insufferable white wine diet. She liked homosexuals who did things with their nick-knacks. His grandfather had a Jaguar with a chauffeur but insisted on sitting democratically in the front. Conor said to him, ‘What’s the point? Why don’t you sit in the back where you belong?’

Last night’s young man reappeared for lunch, then both the visitors evap. Once Conor had got comfortable with a whisky on the sofa, we picked over some extreme Poor Little Rich Gays he knows in London who bought a newly-refurb house in S Kensington for £4.5m, flung all the fittings out onto the street, wouldn’t let any of their friends have so much as a lav seat, and started again. A year later it was finished – but they didn’t like it. Had to be sold.

So they’re still in rented accommodation.

I think it was costly commitment phobia – which is quite big with Poor Little Rich Gays generally. Val, my friend who is passionate for the bottle, lived for ten years in West Norwood with bare floorboards and newspaper on the table. He was always saying it was going to be double doors and plaster-work and gilding and glass panels. Such a vision as could never be known on this earth, I suppose. Better to leave it as such.