Thursday 13th August 2009
As you know, our Tuscan phase begins on Saturday. Anthony Mottram texted from Malaysia: ‘Are you yet at Villa Killing Fields’? No, but I have ordered a stock of Exocet missiles with the Smallmeal/Limpney hutch at Rimini in mind. But I’m just a little worried. The Multis have lavished this villa upon me, Laura Malcolm, Matt Driver, Angus Willis, Fergus Strachan and others but there will be expenses. The Multis very rarely, in fact never, take a wine at less than £50 a bottle. In America recently they complained that it was impossible to find dinner for two at less than 700 dollars.
Poor little rich gays, whether rich or poor, are not as others. That is the whole point. They are disabled in a way. There are a lot of things they can’t manage – participation in normal life is one of them.
Just today on the news they’ve been on about MPs’ salaries, how large etc in the eyes of most people. But to the Multis and the Smallmeal/Lympneys £65,000 a year is the grimmest of wages. When I knew him, before war was declared, Smallmeal would come to dinner with vintage wines in those little carrying baskets and keep them near him all the evening. He said that cheaper wines would poison him.
So, I’m thinking – there will be 14 lunches, 14 dinners at $350 each approx. X 28 is $9800 or £6000. And that doesn’t include the breakfasts. I’d better scrabble around and see if I can find some old money lying in a corner that’s been forgotten about. Otherwise I’ll just have to rocket on my credit card. Or acquire illnesses at mealtimes.
On the other hand, £6000 isn’t so much. I might spend that on half a new bathroom. Only the other day, Bruce MacBain, my architect, said to me, when my kitchen tap was dripping, ‘Why not have a new sink and work surface as well as a new tap?’ That would easily have been £6000.
Seen from the right perspective, certain expenditure looks entirely different. That’s the marvellous thing about money.
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How times have changed! I recall an early holiday in France with Adrian when, far from scrabbling round for the odd £6,000, he refused to spend a franc. Even a trip to town (by bus) in order to get in supplies was deemed an extravagance – for him, at any rate: we were packed off on a round journey of some 30km to do the shopping while he remained at the house no doubt relaxing or going through our laundry checking our labels. Not that we had them in those days.
We were also obliged to forage for food on a hillside at the back of the house and make our own jam for breakfast using plums from an ancient tree in the garden. Adrian, meanwhile, busied himself in the kitchen boiling down a shot lettuce kindly donated by a local peasant to produce a dark green sludge which he announced would be the basis of “a delicious soufflé”. (Fortunately, we were saved from this culinary treat when one of our party crept out of bed in the middle of the night to remove said sludge from the fridge and throw it out of a window.)
The wine, costing rather less than £50 a bottle, came from a cowshed and had globules of milk floating on its surface.
We may have been poor, but we were happy.
I’ve never got over the loss of that exquisite lettuce puree. I don’t think we could have gone on economising for ever, do you?
My husband and have been forced by circumstances to take a pitched tent for the first time on our trip to one of our country’s beautiful national parks next week. The tents were erected in 1899 and we are promised “a good bed and clean napkin with every meal” but there will be no heating or electricity. A mile up the road is the hotel called “the destination of queens and presidents alike”, at $454 a night. One day, when this time of hardship has passed, Mr Bung and I plan to return and take The Mary Curry Tresider Suite, in which HM Queen Elizabeth II stayed in 1983, and which we are told has a bidet; and we will look back on our tent with a shiver. When I think that only a few short months ago we thought nothing of spending a long weekend in a suite at the Beau-Rivage, Lausanne, and now we are reduced to renting a bear-proof locker for our packed lunch. When will this dreadful recession end?
I do feel for you, Mrs Bung. Are you sure you have investigated every corner of your finances? Often there is the odd heap lying around everyone has forgotten about. Could you be more insistent with your advisors? I can’t bear to think of you in a bear-proof tent
I remember that Adrian and I once shared a dormitory with some greasy stevedores in Petraeus. I had suggested the Grand Bretagne, but fighting extravagence was just then a la mode and he would have none of it.