Friday 8th July 2011
I’m just back from a Photo Shoot at Bruce MacBain’s, my personal architect. So much to tell about his curtain over the door; it’s been years and still not right; now the Poor Little Rich Gays of Belsize Park are piling in, wanting everything torn down for a complete re-build , he, Bruce MacBain, to arrange just like that.
He was just able, between breaths, to graph me in my outfits.
Yesterday Connor Cadoux, of the Australian Poor Little Rich Gays, boarded for Bodrum where he and Sonny Hammond are to join a gullet and cruise. I took a gullet some years ago with Laura Malcolm, Matt Driver, Frankie-Doreen May, Giles Ullerston and the children. It was complete heaven but we did think next time we’d have flushing toilets not pump-action. I don’t know what the Australian Poor Little Rich Gays will make of it. It is unlikely that any enchanting likelinesses will make themselves known from the shore. There’s simply nobody there. On the whole, the gullet experience is not front line Poor Little Rich Gay. It’s quite outdoor. Sonny is looking forward to wearing his Lanvin summer scarf on board (it was he who made the summer scarf new for this summer; don’t let that be forgotten). He’s already tried it on the motorino in Rome and, owing to its fine lightness, it nearly blew away. He must have stopped off in Istanbul before going on to Bodrum. At the Blue Mosque he refused to leave his Bottega Veneta slip-ons on the public rack and had to be given a plastic bag to carry them in. I said: ‘Leave out the Blue Mosque altogether; there’s an awful smell of feet within’.
Also dreary, etre frank.
Meanwhile, back in our sacred homeland, Poor Little Rich Gays are racking their brains to think of the headlines that will now never appear in the News of the World depicting their plentiful scandals.
If only they’d hacked into our phones…. we wouldn’t have minded…
Come back tomorrow for more sales shopping and Lord Arrowby’s party. I think I’m going to wear the Prada stone slacks, so immaculately tooled.
The Bath Abbey Wedding Outfit Live - with the Metal Trousers
The Bath Abbey Wedding Outfit - 'Tuxedo' by Topman, Metal Trousers by Niccolo Ceschi Berrini, Summer Scarf by Dries
The Bath Abbey Wedding Outfit: I Went Off this Topman Jacket and Bought a Substitute by Marc Jacobs Reduced from £900. Now I'm Back On It Again
My White and Cream Dream - All by Zara with Dries Summer Scarf
My White and Cream Dream with Summer Scarf by Dries
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All these headless shots!
It’s like the Poor Little Rich Gaydar. (Or so I’m told.)
But with frockage, of course.
Let’s hope it stops there.
Lovely hands, incidentally.
Those are hired hands, of course
Dear Adrian – Funny you should say you wouldn’t have minded being hacked. You might if you were. We were contacted this afternoon by Paddington Green who said my husband and I were on the list of 4,000. They have asked us to request mobile phone records from 2007 from the relevant service providers. Lord, where will it all end?
At least you’re on the list!
Dear Adrian – It will be a shame to see News of the World for the last time tomorrow. It has always been the favourite Sunday read in our house, the children adore it. It will be missed but not forgotten!
Exactly – the children adore it! That’s the level. I’ve just broken off from laundry work to listen to Any Questions. Matthew Parris off his head. Claims that Murdoch saved the British press. Said the News of the World was a great paper. I remember Larry Lamb; he was father of a friend of mine at Barrowborough, the editor of the Sun in the 70s who, backed up by Murdoch, invented the modern tabloid style. I was often round their flat in Kensington in those days. They had a champagne leather suite. He was a clever, rather tortured man, self-made of course and ultimately done over by Murdoch – something to do with shares. But surely, surely the screaming 4-foot headlines, the raving 2 inch opinions, the unwholesome blend of tits, prejudice, leering, smug tittle-tattle is the absolute worst. We have one of the most awful Presses, rivaled only by the US, in the free world and Murdoch is greatly to blame: in the tabloid garden ignorance, laziness, conceit, an unwholesome fascination with ‘scandal’, bullying and narrow-mindedness, just about every unattractive human trait, are cunningly nurtured by people who ought to know better.
everyone needs tittle tattle. if only your blog had it you may find that you became the most widely read english language blog in the world. pity on you. you must be the most poorly read blog in the universe.
Our American press has far higher standards of accuracy and even-handedness than your British papers. Indeed, it is sometimes hard to believe that any such standards exist in the British Isles at all. Every time Mr Bung and I visit the UK we are struck afresh by the shameless grandstanding and gratuitous exaggeration that pass for journalism in your country. Only in Adrian Edge can one find the cool, magisterial balance one expects from, say, the New York Times.
Thank you, Mrs S. Bung of Cal. I’m making a close study of the last ever edition of the News of the World: two prominent items have a delightful, cleverly concealed homophobic whiff; a double-page spread shrieks ‘We’ve saved children from paedos and nailed 250 evil crooks’. Yes, and so have a lot of other people without sinking to this sort of babyish language and smug gloating. The actual ‘story’ in the end makes no distinction between ‘Fallen star..TV actor Alford…9 months for supplying cocaine’, to ‘Hero’ Mazher Mahmood, undercover investigative reporter from the News of the World, and ‘Evil personified…kids’ home paedos Valvona and Iredale…caged after Maz (the ‘hero’ again) defied armed enforcer to nail them.’ ‘Maz’ has selected and put in a special box his ‘Dirty dozen: Crimebuster Maz Fingers his Top 12 Court Victories’. Is it a coincidence that 8 of the 12 have filthy foreign names?
Elsewhere is a glorious parade of front pages of the News of the World through the centuries: 9 from the pre-Murdoch era cover serious news stories in a sober manner; thereafter, it’s ‘Andrew and the Playgirl’ ‘Tory Boss Archer Pays off Vice Girl’. Out of 36 front pages from 1984, 21 (but honestly I didn’t count very carefully) are sex or drugs scandals or both; the remaining 15 are the death of Royalties (plus ‘The Queen mets Camilla’), the occasional IRA bomb, one War, Jade’s cancer and paedophiles. The mixture is telling: a salacious, hypocritical fascination with adultery, ‘bonking’ and cocaine from the antiquated viewpoint of some half-baked fantasy of family life: ‘Save our children from filthy paedos’ etc. daintily placed in a gruelling, curliqued, ‘antiqued’ picture frame of the Royal Family – although they’re good for mouth-watering dirty talk if necessary: ‘Hewitt Sells Di Sex Letters’ raves one cover: ‘Her nickname for our private parts’, ‘How she sent me love toy in Gulf’.
Such is the great contribution of the News of the World to British culture. A paper for the working class indeed! What working class? Those remaining abandoned this drivel years ago. The New of the World has had its day. That’s the real reason why it had to go. It’s been seen through for the patronising, manipulative rubbish it is. Let’s hope the other tabloids are soon to follow. Their days are numbered, that’s for sure.
The NOTW, as a profit making newspaper and by the number of readers was the most successful newspaper in the World. It’s profits subsidised the loss making Times. Will the Times be shut down next, therefore, as those profits are no longer there to subsidise it?? It was not just the working class who read NOTW. It had it’s place in British Culture – as does outdated old fashioned intellectual snobbery that deplores NOTW