Robert Nevil and Party’s Classic Type 2 Poor Little Rich Gay Holiday from Menton, Con’t «

Robert Nevil and Party’s Classic Type 2 Poor Little Rich Gay Holiday from Menton, Con’t

Thursday 24^th June 2010

I’m suffering from Pre-Boarding Tension, especially now the Multis have failed to board for the second time owing to strike action. They were due at the Voile d’Or at Cap Ferrat (578 euros a night), if you recall, while my lodgement is nearby at the two-star Panoramic. It is not yet known if they can be conveyed.

On Sunday I will gaze in person on the now legendary Menton villa party of Robert Nevil, Joshua Baring and Blanche Spain who have exhibited so excellently the Type 2 Poor Little Rich Gay holiday. Type 1, as you know, is taken by the exhausted entrepreneur (PLRGs are rarely employees) and is the equivalent of full hospitalisation. Type 2, it has to be said, suits the more financially efficient PLRGs and their followers. It has two main features: massive queenaria and loveliness re: food and even re-styling of the villa or hotel AND highly unlikely sight-seeing driven by contempt for the main attractions. It goes without saying, both Types offer scope for grandeur and attitude.

The Menton Party have made a point of graves, Beardsley’s and Edward Lear’s (but the Foce cemetery at San Remo too far gone for PLRGs to tidy, Joshua Baring reports), monuments to minor Royalty of La Belle Époque (look accent!), whose ghosts haunt the Côte, Robert Nevil says, Latin plaques (wrong, apparently, according to Blanche Spain) commemorating the visit of Queen Victoria and villas called ‘Balmoral’.

A highlight was the Villa Ephrussi-Rothschild at Cap Ferrat. The Rothschilds are of course relations of Joshua Baring. Oh yes! In at the top floor. Béatrice Rothschild dug up and threw away the entire hillside to make way for her garden. That is was in the late 19^th. She filled her villa with Fragonards and Bouchers of ladies in bed, having turned to the ‘ladyparts’, as the French guideexplained, after apparently being infected with syphilis by her Russian banker husband (still too delicate to mention after all these years, I suppose). Her shopping method was to summon works of art by train, have them unloaded onto the station platform, inspect and then either purchase or return.

Could we try this at home?

Better-known attractions of course disappointed. The Musée International de la Parfumerie has been struck out by Joshua Baring: ‘dull and EU’. The Fondation Maeght: ‘hideous daubs, dreadful applied art’, the only attraction a worker with a spanner, not art but real.

Now food: I’m running out of time and I’ve outfits to plan for the cocktail party at Villefranche tomorrow night followed by the actual 50^th Birthday dinner for Ralph Kitto at the Cap on Saturday as well as a travelling outfit and two day outfits. I’m back on Sunday.

At Taggia, absolutely unknown village, the Menton party were told the kitchen was closed. No lunch. Unthinkable. The kitchen was opened. Back home at the villa, Robert Nevil and Joshua Baring are unthawed and give the shopkeepers the time of their lives. Remember, staff of Poor Little Rich Gays should never have known such splitting of sides, nor such terror. The result at Menton: they are showered with free produce by grateful merchants. Shopping is precise, needle-sharp. Local produce, dishes of the region, only the best. At the table there are garnishes (‘a petal or one tiny…snail’, Blanche Spain informs) as well as ‘hot and cold running fizzy and flat.’