Thursday 28th July 2011

(Could not post yesterday owing to rural lack of WiFi in Normandy: but today have met Maxence qui est un tres jeune entrepreneur with WiFi and no pants apparently)

I don’t often mention my new car. On Tuesday its Xenon driving lights forged through to Normandy. I said to Esmé Manning, the actress, who was with: ‘I’ll see people clocking as we disgorge from this vehicle on the car deck. They’ll be thinking with some loathing: “Serious car, another, better, dream life.” She said: ‘Real class is in the Eurotunnel not on this rotting hulk by P & O.’

Oh terrible false economy to save £90.

We’re seething with events. In Normandy is the summer home of the Straight branch of the Poor Little Rich Gays. How they’re coming on! Ivy Driver, the daughter, is tending strongly to complex dining at only 15. She’s got a gay friend! Matt Driver, the husband, is up a step-ladder despite a salary exceeding Smallmeal’s (head of landfill in this country or whatever). Then there’s Esmé’s crise financial. ‘But you’re in the top 5% I keep telling her.’ ‘Well, I pity the other 95,’ she says. Her eyebrow threading bill is ruinous. She’ll have to go back on the stage. She couldn’t get the vast plastic-slab of a price tag (£1.99) off her Pound Stretcher glasses. It was plainly intended as a punishment for the reduced price.

So much to tell: I’m rather wondering whether Kelm Driver, the son, might be able to help me with my little plans. It’s a question of who he might know at Art School.

But it’ll have to wait because Bruce MacBain’s curtain agony screams to be heard: he’s my private architect. Laura Malcolm’s too and architect to all the Poor Little Rich Gays. Laura is the wife of Matt Driver, who is in global charge of finding out the deep, buried reasons for our product choices,  the aim being to massively up sales in general. Rather not us, others. At work he ponders certain products with such brilliance that he can afford not to buy them himself.

Bruce MacBain has been five years choosing a curtain to cover his disused front door which, after total reconfiguring of his 18^th century terraced home, is now  in the corner of his ‘living area’. He made his home side-loading. You enter through a side wall. Three years ago I ordered him to select an excellent lilac, heather-mixture silk/linen of which he had a sample ( it was client’s revenge). ‘That’s the one. I want it up in three weeks.’ It wasn’t. Some more samples appeared and lay about. Finally, finally, this May it was announced that the curtain was underway. A heavy silk/linen in old gold had been selected at £150 a metre. Tancredo Viamare, Bruce MacBain’s non-resident partner (or byf, as we used to say), spent three hours discussing, with the maker, the size of ring to be inserted into the fabric so the curtain could be threaded into a pole. Do you know that look?

In June the curtain arrived and was installed.

The curtain maker had gained little from the three-hour conference. The rings are the wrong size. Far too big. In the meantime, Bruce has taken against rings altogether. He wants a rare curtain tape, very wide, which gives pleats every 6 inches.

The top will have to be chopped off the curtain. Luckily he’s got some spare fabric to compensate. All the same, the agony.

Bruce MacBain's Curtain: All Wrong

Bruce MacBain's Wrong Rings: In Fact I Recall a Line from Hardy Very Right for PLRGs '...Love/ Wrings with Wrong...' Prob. Misquoted Slightly

Esme Manning's Pound Stretcher Specs with Punititive Irremoveable Label Recalling the Scarlet Letter or the Placard Helen Burns was Forced to Wear in 'Jane Eyre'