Anthony Mottram's well-named hotel room in Penang

Friday 21^st August 2009

 Poor Anthony Mottram! As you know, I cruelly broke the tradition of twenty years. I said: No, Anthony, no holiday threesome this year, no you and me, however baggy and comfortable after 40 years together, no to your twenty-three-year-old boyfriend, in this case Vladimir from the Ukraine. I fucked off with the Multis to Tuscany, doubly cruel because Mottram loves Tuscany; it is ours. Seven times we have been here.

 What were my reasons? Was it spite? Was it principle? Taking a principled stand might be dangerous, could turn out to be nothing of the kind. We have always holidayed as a three, the role of the third, younger Mottram boyfriend (we have got older, they have stayed the same age) being taken by a range of Eastern European young men. Why not carry on the same? Why make a fuss?

 I feel guilty. If only he could have been here, in Tuscany. In Malaysia, he visited a fly farm. It rained. It was terribly hot. Especially in The Old Kitchen. This is the name of a hotel room. Do look at the pictures. Look at all those pots and pans heaped up in the bedroom! No TV, no air-con, no mini-bar, but still a vastly expensive Old Kitchen.

 Mottram himself wonders if this is the ultimate gay holiday experience – a hotel so purified it barely has electricity let alone a mini-bar – and a bedroom which is an old kitchen. And, of course, all at glorious expense.

 There is a further peculiarity. Mottram himself is, or imagines himself to be, an Old Kitchen. Let me explain. One of his previous boys was learning English and got ‘kitchen’ and ‘chicken’ muddled up. Mottram did not correct him. ‘Shall we have some kitchen for dinner?’ this young man would say. So ‘kitchen’ came to mean ‘chicken’. At some later point, ‘kitchen/chicken’ came to stand for the boy himself (as a spring chicken, Easter chick; i.e. young and lovely, small and fondle-able) and, later still, Mottram himself, as a lover of kitchens, took to referring to himself as an old kitchen.

 So how right that he should end up in a hotel room named The Old Kitchen in Penang.

Mottram's kitchen suite in Penang

The Mottram Old Kitchen suite in Penang