Friday 12th November 2010
Friday 13th by a whisker.
I’m not actually in a clinic. Merely I ought to be. My dinner thoughts are getting out of hand. Last Saturday I gave a dinner, the Saturday before that I received one, at Peter Acharya and Ned Czernowksi’s. Next week I take three dinners in a row, on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
Peter and Ned are superb, purring, untroubled dinner-givers. Their table is glass, mounted with fine drinking glass. It is a confection, rising to a peak apparently, dotted with silver items such as napkin rings. Ned is an architect. The apartment is beautiful, not a fault in the workmanship, and no flexes trailing, all styled away.
One guest said to another, ‘Who’s your jacket by?’ but didn’t wait, just wrenched it open to view the label. We all agreed this is the only approach, although care must be taken not to break the neck if targeting a jumper or shirt. Peter caused outrage at the Acropolis recently where an official was complaining about Lord Elgin taking the marbles. ‘It’s a pity he didn’t get the lot. Anyway, they wouldn’t be much use to you now, with your debt problem. You’d have to sell them.’ He also made a shopgirl remove her jeans so he could buy them but that wasn’t in Greece. We saw his baby photos. At six, Peter had bunches; two older sisters kept him as a girl. Ned said his bedtime lullaby when a baby was his mother belting out ‘Hello Dolly’.
Before dinner we visited another apartment where some gays were clambering into drag. Later we saw them coming back from wherever they’d been. See graphs below.
Then there was my own dinner, attended as it happens by Ned and Peter, as well as the Multis, Conor Cadoux and some darling straights from Trenton’s gallery. Conor was incoherent for quite a lot of the time.
Do you know, horror to say it, but I’m just a little off Ottolenghi. That was my menu. All that tahini, green crunch, pomegranate seeds, labneh (see yesterday’s posting), you do rather long for a stout cheese sauce.
Let’s hope it’s just a phase.
But that’s not the point. I don’t think I’m the only Poor Little Rich Gay condemned to entertain but flayed alive by the experience. I recall Smallmeal lurking inadequate at his own great functions. After all, why bother with face, hair, frockage, food, decor, home, personality if it’s not to be seen? And we must share, reach out, give; we cannot sit alone all our days. Nothing will come of nothing. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
But what drives us to ever greater heights of matching sets, finer wines, grander and more expansive guest lists is also what prises us apart, exposes, wounds.
After one of my dinners, I think ‘Never again!’ I’m inconsolable.
Well, what’s to be done? Maybe I should phone up The Priory. There must be a short course available. I imagine a glass of hot water to sip while I’m therapised.
Memory mercifully rearranges experience into more pleasant forms; it also poisons. There have been happy dinners, even large ones. There will be again.
Do you know, I’m tending towards Christmas drinks – 40 people or 50 or 500.
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Papal-druidical rather than true drag, surely?
Dear Adrian – re your earlier post on procuring Lebanese food: you don’t have to go to Edgware Road. There is a very posH Lebanese deli on Wigmore Street – it’s terrific and you should try it:
http://www.lecomptoir.co.uk/
Love, TonI
Yes, it’s very border-line, isn’t it? Eddie Sedgewick took one look at Jan Morris, the celebrity sex-changist, in a sensible tweed suit and said: ‘What’s the point? If I went to Morocco and all that bother, I’d have false eyelashes and a bee-hive’.
Oh I will. If only I’d known
And surely you don’t BUY preserved lemons? Easiest thing in the world to make and you can use the money you save from not trolling off to the Edgware Road to buy more moisturiser. Get out your Elizabeth David, for goodness’ sake – though not your Jamie Oliver, who fancies them up with all manner of herbs and spices. That said, I had so many lemons soaking [essential preparation] this year that I did two batches: one as usual; one with simple addition of cardamon, as suggested by some online American harpy. I’ll let you know.
But I got the preserved lemons at Borough. It was for the labneh that I had to go Edgware Road. I’ve always thought doing your own preserved lemons sounds very pricey. Don’t you have to buy tons of lemons to get the juice to soak the ones you’re preserving?
No no no. Not if you follow E. David, as all PLRGs should as a matter of course. Perhaps, given your boredom with Ottolenghi, you should give the old girl another go?
But don’t you need so much lemon juice? Gallons of it?
I wouldn’t say I’m bored with Ottolenghi but last night at Frankie-Doreen Gunn’s we had roast pork with apple sauce except she forgot to put the apples. Comforting yet elegant. Ottolenghi rather austere. Also cold. Cold sauce with hot often.
Please do have Christmas drinks, but not on the 11th, 18th, 21st, 22nd or 23rd December. Assuming I would be on your list of 50 or 500.
The living full diary! With its hint of wound! I am stabbed. Monday 20th was the date I am toying with! You would be on my list of one. Do ladies console Poor Little Rich Gays?
Be consoled by the blankness beyond these dates. And anyway, a full diary smacks of compensation. Many bores are out all the time.
Yes, you are right and I am such a one! I am only diarised in December for 4th, 7th, 11th (poss), 12th, 15th, 16th – SO FAR!!! The Christmas season, of course, brings its own very special diary anxieties, as we know.
Do you notice how in the Bitch and Crunch for diary dates all one’s real friends are forgotten?