Wednesday 24th  August 2011

Carol Earle is to gain from New York after all: so that’ll be two important curators of New York museums encountered by me, Adrian Edge, this Tuscan season.

I’m still hoping to go deep. Don’t worry: I’ve not forgotten my long promised meditation on kitchen love (see glossary), inspired by talk and experience at my apartemento near San Giminiwhinny last week. Poor Little Rich Gays often take, house and provide for  a heavenly boyish lover, perhaps Brazilian.   On the whole, the kitchen stays the same age, while the Poor Little Rich Gay gets older.

It’s being called San Giminiwhinny is to do with Anthony Mottram’s (my oldest and closest friend, now estranged) mother’s dog. In fact there were about four dogs but they were all called Ginny and they were all Bedington Terriers, which is a blue dog going brown at the extremities with age. When calling for Ginny, Mottram’s mother would go: ‘Ginnyminiwhinny…ginnyminiwhinny…ginnyminiwhinny….’

Then there’s Tuscany itself. Why Tuscany? In July 1976, Anthony Mottram, now estranged over the kitchen question,  and I didn’t think twice. The Molino di Castagnoli, near Gaiole in Chianti, was advertised in The Times at £40 a week. As it turned out, no running water and  a river opening up in the kitchen (or more properly, chicken) when it rained, which it did often. But it was enchanting; roughly converted by some people from Oxfordshire, deep, deep, low down in the wooded valley, but with views and glimpses of other, mysterious dwellings in the hills.  Then there were the Cortona days in the early 80s, then glorious Il Poggino in 1995, the first truly lump-sum Tuscan villa of the Poor Little Rich Gay era. Anthony Mottram had a good wheel-barrow full  from his first ventures in ‘consulting’ in the Central of Europe.

But really our life in Tuscany has changed little in 35 years, it’s just got more expensive. And Anthony Mottram’s not here any more.

Change – water-colour memories – a little trip down memory lane won’t do any harm. But Laura Malcolm, who achieved the villa on Monday, with Matt Driver, congratulated Lady Newell, 82, mother of Elsa Hodgeman, the Gertrude Stein de nos jours, on her modernity and not looking back. Lady N’s got an iPod and makes videos.

Somehow they’re all going to blend into one: the kitchen question, the Tuscan memory lane; change, what has changed, if anything, what the future holds.

But to the present: we’re a big party now and expanding with more robustness than the stock prices. The Multis have backed a winner in terms of attendance: also in is Elsa’s daughter, Adelaide, now 18, whippy in figure, delightful, clever, likely to convert a jaded Poor Little Rich Gay of a certain age if anyone is. Bruce MacBain, my private architect, and his partner, Tancredo Viamare, dock on Thursday. Then we will be 13 in the house possibly.

This morning breakfast was taken in the gloomy dining room with the windows sealed, not outside, owing to some ludicrous vaporisation of wasps going on in the villa park. There was an atmosphere of a girls’ school. Captain Blond Multi (Laura Malcolm has pointed out his resemblance to those absolutely splendid boy officers of the 1st World War) was planning an attack, on the phone, according to Matt Driver, to the Geological Map Society of Chianti to arrange a visit. Actually I think it was a wine-tasting. Later Lady Newell,82, who was complaining at breakfast about men with no hair, was seen driving out in the Multi, hired convertible swathed in at least 8 scarves all anchored by a huge sun hat. It could have been Lady Hester Stanhope or Gertrude Bell. Back at breakfast, the Photo Multi was promoting a new nun-made honey, bought directly from the nun outside B&Q Montevarchi (well, Italian equivalent), whence he had gone yesterday to buy an inflatable dolphin.Meanwhile, Laura Malcolm was doing her imitation of a veiled Muslim lady (achieved with only one napkin).

Last night we went to that Cameron-blessed restaurant. Captain Blond said to me, Adrian Edge: ‘Do you think your readers will stand any more of Cameron?’ Well, probably not. They didn’t have a single table for nine, so the women sat at one table and the men at the other, this having, purely by chance, been the seating arrangement in the bar downstairs as we waited to go up to the restaurant. It was decided to continue with it to see what would happen.

That was why Laura was tending to a veiled condition, you see. Other diners were astonished, also by our picking at each other’s food to get the beauty of as much of the menu as poss. Lady Newell’s huge steak was devoured in a coarse way at the men’s table, she not wishing to take such a hunk.

The Cameron table was occupied outrageously by a Scand family who had all been plunged into desperate lobster-crisis by the sun. Their weg was sitting in the PM’s seat. After they’d gone, I occupied it myself, of one last time, and recited: ‘Palmerston, Disraeli, Gladstone, Sir Winnie, Margaret….’

It means something to me. Laura said, ‘If you want to sit in his seat, you want to have his babies.’  She also said something unrepeatable if fantastical about what you might find deposited where someone has been sitting.

So that’s the end of Cameron. Captain Blond announced at breakfast that a visit to the actual Cameron villa, also a vineyard, is not possible. They’re harvesting for the next three weeks.

I did take a wine-tasting on Monday and, do you know, I didn’t crack open with boredom. It was at Castagnoli. I couldn’t believe it. Where that Molino was, and still is. I looked out of the window while  the barking wine guide was explaining about wines with fur overtones  and that the sangiovese grape is ‘aggressive, not an easy grape’ (just like Poor Little Rich Gays). There it was, far in the distance, way down below, blind walls and a roof, tiny windows – the Molino di Castagnoli, where Tuscany was first transfused into Poor Little Rich Gay veins 35 years ago.

But it’s not going to come off: I’m not going to have time to make that spinach omelette cake with tomato sauce and perhaps a bechamel, laboured over for days at the Molino in 1976 by Mottram and me. The recipe was in a crazy book in that house called something like ‘Bitter Leaves and Honey in Tuscan Kitch.’

Now I think of it, Mottram and I were fabulous non-speakers when trying to re-create the pasta pie at Cortona in 1981 approx (sweet hot water pastry case, tortellini, stuffed, within, in a complicated meat ragu), We’d read about it in the Sunday Times Magazine.

I should mention that the food here is going well.  Lamb legs with saffron and balsamic. Two legs from the macelleria in Gaiole in Chianti, Euros 74. Lunch yesterday also: melon superb from verdura in Gaiole. Prince Dmitri wore his lederhosen.

The hot nighttime dinner cooks emerge from the kitchen into the park to find what looks like a blazing pyre in the distance: it is the dinner table, styled by the Photo Multi with 40 or 50 night-lights and anti-mosquito torches.

As we speak, Prince Dmitri is bashing and cursing his way in the kitch. to a tiramisu. He doesn’t like wasps but is nolonger in lederhosen.

A Kitchen Meets Its Fate

The Molini di Castagnoli: Taken by Anthony Mottram and me, Adrian Edge, for 3 weeks in 1976: £40 a week

Sacred Pyre: The Villa Dinner Table at Night

Honey Nun Outside B&Q, Montevarchi: Help Save Her Nunnery

Imagine if This Were Your Drawing Room: Rocca di Castagnoli, Wine Tour

The Old Italy: Gentlemen at Castagnoli: Villa in Background Went for $8m

Just to Prove I Didn't Make It Up: Report of Cameron's Visit to Osteria di Montegonzi in Italian National Newspaper

Montalcino Wayne Taken by Cameron: That's Enough about Him

Dawn at the Villa