Tuesday 3rd January 2012

Once again we wave goodbye to Christmas and I still haven’t told you about Reggie Cresswell’s New Year Party, where that world ceramicist became, for me at least, an ogee shape moving across a vast expanse of champagne carpet with a champagne bottle at the shoulder.

The work of giving a party! Even for a figure internationally known.

Lord Arrowby was there, my fatal love-interest – oh!  Never more ravishing nor impossible.

There’s more to tell.

But, moving back , my Christmas joy was woven with death, as I’ve mentioned. Which threw light on which, I wonder?  Cousin Smurry accidentally reinvented Christmas dinner. For two years now we’ve had no bird and trimmings because of her new dog, which is out of control and will remain so. This year she produced Ottolenghi, the chicken with sumac, z’atar and lemon. Do you know, I was convinced. I’ve been deeply against the no bird; in fact I was quite willing to explode the family on account of it. Poor Little Rich Gays spend every day of the rest of the year remaking, reinventing, making it new, making it new. A ruthlessly traditional Christmas dinner is all we have to cling on to.

Cousin Smurry took even that away. But now she’s given something back, almost another nativity. Ottolenghi may have been looking tired on every other day, but on Christmas Day it shone like the star in the East which guided the Wise Men.

Oh I was thrilled.

As last year, the Gay Mother and I visited Mrs Dinner (or ‘Dinner’ as she is feudally known), our old retainer,  in her nursing home. She bucketed into the day room in her wheelchair, blazing with jewels and coiffure, shrieking with delight to see us, her bandaged legs explained as a fall from her bike (not in fact ridden for 25 years, but no matter), hoping soon to be released while keen to emphasise how well she is looked after. It is hard to put your finger on what exactly is wrong. She is not confused but deluded and the delusions keep on changing. Occasionally they appear to coincide with reality or do they? In any case, conversation peters out rather in some kind of acknowledgement, perhaps on both sides, that the entire visit might either be forgotten immediately or redescribed to others in terms quite other.

Not so June Cut-Deeping, best friend for 70 years of Anthony Mottram’s mother, who at 93 is bodily shrinking in a hospital at Fordingbridge. I gained in my official car on the way back from the Gay Mother’s.

(Mottram has condescended to text but will not yet speak after our estrangement of two years: we had an enjoyable exchange: ME: ‘You’ve not had a good year, I see: they’ve got you out in Libya and Tunisia.’ HIM: ‘You’re running out of friends in Syria.’ ME: ‘I saw you being stretchered into that court room in Egypt with a fab raven rinse.’ HIM: ‘You’re still raving in Tehran.’

This is more like it.

June Cut-Deeping was often on the Royal Yacht in Malta days; in fact Blaster stepped on Princess Elizabeth’s dress, the fool. Once I drove her from Wiltshire to the Lake District: ‘This isn’t at all the route we take for Stranraer,’ she declared. ‘We always take A roads for Stranraer.’  ‘In the car for Stranraer, there’s always air conditioning. Does this car have air-conditioning?’

Well, she is to remain one-up to the end, that’s clear, even on death itself. ‘I blame Dr Livesey,’ she announced. ‘I was perfectly all right before I went anywhere near him.’  Dr Livesey refused the heart valve operation before Christmas on account of her poor state. ‘He should have chanced it.’ Now she won’t mix in the ward: ‘They’re not may tape,’ she boomed to general hearing. ‘They’re a lot of old trouts.’