Sunday 1^st May

Today is the actual birthday of the Photo Multi.

Samuel Beckett wrote a play called Happy Days. In the first act Winnie is buried to the waist in sand, in the second to the neck. She talks a lot. Sadness after sex, she can understand, but sadness after song is too crushing.

I’ve had Sadness after Wedding. I keep turning on the TV for a vestige but there is none.

Thank the Lord for the Photo Multi’s birthday dinner under the arches in Maltby Street, Bermondsey. You may remember a set-menu restaurant pops up there every Friday, given by the sons of the Monmouth Coffee House Chief Executive Officer, whose headquarters, where the Multis have this winter become intimate, is next door.

Maltby Street otherwise is to be the new Borough Market, now that that place has been contaminated by tourists and fraudulence.

So, we foregathered on the concrete apron outside the arch, with a corrugated iron and wasteland backdrop and the railway line above. Top people abounded: the BBC’s Head of Sport, from the Art World, Elsa Hodgeman, the Gertrude Stein de nos jours, her mother, Lady Newell, adjusting to the location, Beatrice Cantor, Seth Vaughan, Flint Cantor; from the Money World, Prince Dmitri Hersov and  Sinclair Silverwater.  Merton, his wife, was dressed by Alexander McQueen in the most plunging manner ever seen. ‘What about your bra?’ Laura Malcolm, the novelist and expert in French ways, said on being first introduced. We have met Merton before. She attends trunk sales, which are previews of the preview, at the design houses twice a year. Working with her husband, she manages a very considerable frockage budget. She told me that they now use the PLRG term – as did, by the way, Hannah Betts in the Daily Graph yesterday. ‘Opinion was divided regarding Pippa Middleton’s McQueen ensemble: gorgeous frockage…’

‘I’ve been dreading it,’ the Photo Multi confided. ‘I can’t bear attention to be drawn to me.’ So it is for Poor Little Rich Gays here and throughout the world. We are condemned to receive, throw open the home, arrange and diarise although temperamentally quite unsuited to doing so. For this reason, in part, we feel so close to the Monarchy whose sublime head, Her Sacred Majesty the Queen, is in exactly the same position.

On my left at the dinner I had Laura Malcolm: no, she hadn’t liked the bridesmaids and why had Kate Middleton never had a job? What kind of message was that for feminism? These are difficult questions which I will keep for another day. What is the reality of human relations? What is marriage? The Palazzo Farnese ceiling, my account of which is still held up, comes into it, you know. You wait and see.

On my right, Flint Cantor, the artist, very wicked and well-publicised brother of Beatrice, scrubbed up, re-haired, bronzed, altogether ravishing. He explained that having had sex with the same woman for many years, he now thought he would try a range. The trouble is very few of them have any pubic hair. It’s a new trend. He likes blondes with matching pubic hair. I suggested Civil Partnership, so thrilled was I by this talk. He said: ‘Have you got a flat?’ I said, ‘A house.’ He’d been painting Hitler all day.

O! The Poor Little Rich Gay life. The unexpectedness!

I must publish the menu for this dinner. It was absolutely outstanding.

But it’ll have to wait.

So finally, finally, I quite forgot that Joshua Baring mentioned on Friday while we were viewing the Wedding at Robert Nevil and Sebastian Archer’s that a virtual member of the Royal Family would be giving him an Abbey-and-Palace-fresh perspective next week. And Peter Achyra sent me a message from Mauritius where he is presently villa-ed: ‘I told you Alexander McQueen had taken the apartment next door for a secret purpose, didn’t I?’

Indeed he had, many months ago. And I told you.

The Setting for the Photo Multi's Birthday Dinner

Merton Silverwater's Exceptional Evening Bag