Wednesday 24th November 2010
‘twas a dreary Sunday last. We went to Strawberry Hill. I hope you know it? Horace Walpole, creator of, late 18th century, villa at Twickenham, on London’s outskirts. Founded a whole architectural style, known as Strawberry Hill Gothic, copied throughout the land.
At present the house is being restored. It’s not finished, has no furniture, but you can go round.
In the party, Bruce MacBain, my architect, his partner, Tancredo Viamare, Professor Sir Lewis Buller, the insect expert of world renown and his partner from the fabric world, me, Adrian Edge, and my abuser/friend, Robert Nevil. So an onslaught of six Poor Little Rich Gays, our conversation generally unsuitable, winging through the parlours and amongst the earnest visitors. RN: ‘That rabbit with chocolate you served up!’ ‘Thirty years ago! ‘ I protested. ‘It was a Jane Grigson recipe.’ ‘Disgusting. I didn’t know whether to vomit or faint or both. I’d only just only just retrieved myself from a stranger’s bed. I was wrecked with hangover. My new “friend” had a flatmate, possibly a borderline boyfriend. I heard this person through the wall. “How was yours?” he was asking.’
Sir Lewis, when a don, was the host of the celebrated Oxbridge party where rampancy set in and raged so fiercely, Xavier Pillar, now something huge at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and I, Adrian Edge, had to clamber over writhing bodies to get out of the distinguished, donnish door.
That was 30 years ago also, if a day.
But now, the present: Strawberry Hill. Robert Nevil overheard a lady saying she knew perfectly well why Horace Walpole had housed an actress in the grounds. ‘I don’t think so,’ RN murmured.
Horace Walpole was a Poor Little Rich Gay, you see, one of the earliest known perhaps. He had a camp coterie of women, and men who did architectural drawings. He had squillions from his father, bought up bits of old abbeys and flung them back together again with fan-vaulting made of papier maché, gilding everywhere and nice bright colours. The overall effect more Rococo, Gothic with a light, decorative twist, which isn’t Gothic at all.
You too could do this. Follow your whim, break all the rules, spend lots of money, get some minion to do drawings (not Bruce MacBain, of course). You never know, you could end up with a world-famous architectural style. Your idea for windows could go global.
As Poor Little Rich Gays we were thrilled and inspired. We loved the amateurishness, the slight fraudulence, the feeling of a stage set with little outbursts of exquisiteness particularly in the lovely arrangements of stained glass.
All the gilding too, newly restored, reminded me of the 80s when Val and I had a craze for gilding everything in sight. We began with Dutch metal, then progressed to real gold. Only oil gilding, where essentially you glue it on from transfers. We never ventured into water gilding, which gives that burnished look of actual metal.#
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