Saturday 17^th December 2011

Can barely breathe with the engagements: Louis Vuitton Bond St opening, Ronnie Ronnie in song at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, dinner at the Multis with a Chelsea Gold Medallist, Matthew Bourne’s Nutcracker, then afterwards to Ed Jasper and Roland Mainflower’s for an Ottolenghi slap-up spread.

And still Tiepolo, Veronese and another Venetian painter seen properly for the first time to be considered from the Venice visit.

Radiant with it, though. I’ll tell you, I really will.

But on Monday Angus Willis, the international food writer and stylist: his mother was laid to rest. Poor Angus is distraught: she was such a support, not at all the usual Poor Little Rich Gay mother, slightly in competition. She hurled herself in to the food world, was often at dinner with the Carluccios or on the tasting trips to India: nothing was to stand in the way of her son’s talent and achievements.

Oh the funeral! Sad but uplifting, one of the best I’ve known. I motored up in my black official car with Xenon driving lights, conveying Merle Barr, head of health, and Angus’s London housekeeper who does part-time clairvoyance for Russell Grant. The church was packed, also with daffs and tulips, done by Angus, of course. There was a proper funeral procession with the coffin shouldered by the funeral men, no horrid trolley. Angus had made a pall: it was a white cloth with a web of white roses attached. Charlie Hurling, the boyhood friend of Angus’s, was to speak which was alarming: he’s the one who thinks of the worst thing to say and says it. But he was marvellous and unafraid and untrammeled by convention and also distressed . As often with those apparently brittle and given to one-liners, beneath lie such depths. He revealed the truth and the truth is always wonderful however far from many people’s simpering ideals: Angus Willis’s mother was splendid, even more so now, in death, than when alive. She was very fond of bickering, and never gave in on any point whatsoever in all her life but, oddly, she was quite free of rancor. In her last months she regained the quality of translucent innocence she must have had in youth. She was terribly wounded by a man in her early 50s and absolutely refused to recover, despite common sense.

She was a force, she really was. The other speaker had taught with her in a primary school. In the lunch-hour, she explained, they would tour charity shops for brooches and the like, just regaining in time for the bell. Angus Willis’s mother would then consume the afternoon showing the children what she’d bought. When accompanying ‘Away in a Manger’ on the piano, she often fell asleep but the children were used to this and carried on. Her stories of psychotic tenants at her holiday cottage in Sussex once held an entire railway carriage spell-bound.

She was a true Poor Little Rich Gay.

Angus Willis's Flowers for His Mother's Funeral

Angus Willis's Flowers for His Mother's Funeral