bag of pomodori styled by one of the multis

 Monday 17^th August 2009

 Tuscany! I have gained. The Multis’ villa is baronial and at the end of miles and miles of dusty track, utterly exclusive and surrounded by the deepest, deepest silence. We have already queened all over it but more of that later. No room is smaller than a tennis court.

 Shall we go cooh, cooh, gush, gush over Tuscany? Do you know a ghastly book called Bella Tuscany by Frances Mayes?  Anthony Mottram and I were here first in 1976, at the Molino di Castagnole – £40 a week, enormous house, half of it not properly indoors, stream running through the kitchen if it rained, six kilometre walk to only, 6 a.m, bus to San Gimini, Siena…where ever we wanted to go. Enchanting!

Is Tuscany now de-based, wrecked by all the gushers and fantasists like Frances Mayes?  No, it isn’t.  At least from this mansion, the view is as it’s always been – ordered and sweeping .  This landscape is grave, simple and unsentimental.  It might look like wild woods but the assemblies of hilltop dwellings, umbrella pines and sombre rows of cypresses are the human addition.  Depicted with calm, factual clarity in so many Renaissance paintings, it has become, unlike other landscapes, a work of art in its own right.

 It is the right back-drop for gays, whose lives are more than usually artificial.

 But we have little time for any of this. Within the baronial halls and immediate environs there is much to attend to. Angus Willis, the internationally known food writer, is furious that the original vaulted kitchen has been turned into a redundant drawing room, one of three, and the huge stone sink is an ornament. I will tell you about his five-year restoration of a Tudor house in Hastings one day. We, with the Multis leading the way,  don’t like the floor tiles (too modern, not reclaimed) the ceilings (the same), the position of the swimming pool, the outside lighting, the shape of the dining table;  the extractor fan over the cooker is at the wrong level; Angus would have all the fake cotty, wooky, Cotswoldy  fitted kitchen cupboards out in a jiffy. The Multis themselves, concerned for their guests and attending to every detail,   have been heaving furniture, wielding the weedy Miele vac, styling vases and fruit bowls. 

It’s excessively stimulating.

You will be intrigued to know that not even a multi-million pound fortune is enough to provide uniformed staff. We have Donatella, who is delightful, but amateur and a deep burnt-orange hue. She warned that this morning she would be late. She was taking her daughter to the doctor; perhaps this offspring is not coming up the same amazing shade.

It’s terrible to mock staff, isn’t it?

 Nor is there immunity to Ikea. Last night at dinner, one of the multis quipped: ‘I see we’re asked to put the burglar alarm on at night.  Not much point. We’ll put up a notice: “Only Ikea within”. ’ There was just was before Mr Fox (or rather Master Fox) was discovered by the fridge, nicely settled for a snooze.

Vegetables styled by Angus Willis, later de-styled by Donatella and re-styled by Angus Willis