Monday 3rd October 2011

I’m so behind. This hot weather has induced sluggishness. Yesterday I drove out with hip- pinned Val to Ewelme, Oxfordshire, where no teashop was forthcoming. Today I was at Princess Anne’s hairdresser’s memorial where Princess Alexandra mingled charmingly at the after-party. She is purely Royal, you know, unlike the Queen. Not a drop of unpurple blood.  There was a sticky moment when one of the speakers claimed before all that the other princess (who was not present) never paid for her coiffures.  On Saturday eight dined at my Official home for my birthday.

It’s all been wonderful and poignant.

So back to Romania, where Poor Little Rich Gays remained absolutely themselves, despite, or perhaps because of, the reduced circumstances.

The Poor Little Rich Gay connection with the Central and Eastern of Europe, the former bloc, indeed the bloc itself (yes, I was there, as was Anthony Mottram) goes back to 1987.

You remember the Bulgarian Orphans?

Former bloc is different, isn’t it? Not the obvious choice. Also, it gives opportunities to make inroads, as you shall see, although the greatest have been made by Anthony Mottram who is personally so much responsible for the new bloc we see today.

The actual birthday dinner was held in a semi-outdoor cow stall, with mud floor, at Prince Charles’s Guesthouse  in Viscri. Some unknown English middle-classes, who happened also to be staying, had to be included. Mrs Middle-Class tried to propose a loyal toast, without success, possibly to drown out Charlie Hurling’s raging account of gastric banding, the flaps of flesh to the knee that curtain the formerly obese  and one whose diet was sucking on food and spitting it out.

Well, we could try that.

At the memorial for Princess Anne’s hairdresser today the best speaker recalled how he and P Anne’s H did imitations of their mutual clients and were felled with hilarity: ‘Moments that can never be recaptured or understood by anyone else,’ he said superbly.

Charlie Hurling’s humorous episodes are like that.

As is much of life.

Judi Dench, the food writer, about whom I was beginning to wonder, was asked by Charlie in a provocative fashion on the second night about a very obvious jar of pickles that was sitting on the table in the darkened barn where we dined: she gave, in that husky, soft voice we know so well as belonging to the other Judi Dench, a plain, calm lavatorial description of the contents. Then she said: ‘I was perfectly horrified by you to begin with but I’m not going to have you think I’m a sheltered spinster.’ The following day, Charlie asked Olive Wildish, the textile designer, whether her beloved only daughter had yet developed pubic hair: ‘Do you have pubic hair, Charlie?’ Judi Dench inquired with that silvery exquistion the Nation loves.

I think, on the whole, Judi Dench, ‘food writer’, was a blind. It was the other Judi Dench, to be sure.

Oh dear! I haven’t described the dinner at all, about which there was much fury and which was gloriously allowed its freedom as a  fiasco. Nor the second dinner and how Angus Willis, not simpering at cautious distance as an ordinary tourist would do, made inroads at Viscri, took command of the raw ingredients of the place and made them into something new.

You’ll have to back tomorrow.

Cow-Stall Outdoor Dining Room at Prince Charles' Guesthouse Where Angus Willis's 50th Birthday Dinner Took Place