The holiday is winding down and we are suffering from mild pre-boarding tension. There is no camperama. There are no more excerpts from Gone with the Wind or, another favourite, Upstairs, Downstairs (‘Since Bridges was took I’ve been awful lonely.’). Instead, the topic is cleaning women, difficulties of relationship with. Matt Driver does not take part. He is looking at the fairy ring.

As we drive out of Normandy, I see the entrance to the great manoire which Simon Limpney once visited on cat business. It was in the days when he favoured Somalian blues, which aren’t blue at all. It’s a kind of pedigree cat, if you don’t know – small and puny, inclined to die. There was an important breeding opportunity to be had at this manoire. He was accompanied by a hired interpreter. Last week, at that castle we visited in Falaise, it suddenly comes back to me, were some models of medieval siege machines. The French name of one, Laura told me, translated as ‘bollock flinger’.

Medieval bollock flinger perhaps useful for laying siege to Massivebury

What a good idea to get a few of these made up and then lay siege to Massivebury, the Smallmeal/Limpney country residence! They would be sitting in their pale aqueous drawing room and a great stone bollock would come hurling through the window.

That would liven up their dull lives.

On the channel ferry I am astonished to see no gays in the premier lounge but two glum pensioners the only occupants. Gays usually like an opportunity to purchase superiority.

No gays in the Premier Lounge on the Channel ferry

I was going to say that a channel ferry of any kind is a challenge to the poor little rich gay. In Prada and Alexander MacQueen one really is impossible in such a setting. Esme recalled that on a previous crossing, when Hopkin was much younger and fussy about his food, I had shrieked at the top of my voice, ‘I’ve found a wich that the child will eat.’ This is front-syllable lopping, another of my tendencies. Either I or Anthony Mottram got the idea from Shakespeare (I’ve wracked my brains to think of an example). But now I begin to wonder. There are quite a number of chronically styled, not necessary gay, young men even in this banal lower rung of Hell. Perhaps this is the problem for the modern gay. How to stand out and be noticed now that no longer picked on and vilified? Although it is not entirely true that gays are not picked on and vilified. By chance Charis tells us about some man she knew who never did any household shopping but one day his girlfriend was ill and he had no choice. He went to Tescos. At the checkout his bankcard failed. He shrieked and screamed. The climax was: ‘What am I, Carlo Maria von Wedderburn, doing in Tescos anyway!’ I was thinking: a gay ought to have been saying that. It’s not fair.  Is this stereotyping? It must mean something to be gay. Is it unreasonable to ask what?

The only thing you can be sure of is that, unlike Carlo Maria von Wedderburn, no gay would have a long-suffering girlfriend-mother to go home to.