Tuesday 6th March 2012

I have to break off from describing dinners. Have you heard about this Catholic bishop who has pronounced about Gay Marriage? He’s described as ‘Britain’s Premier Catholic’. I thought that was the Card Archbish of Westminster. What’s happened to him? Has he died or gone into abeyance?

Anyway, ‘Britain’s Premiere Catholic’ – I’m afraid I don’t know his name – is plainly the man of the future. He’s actually listened to what I’ve been saying for years. ‘How about three in a marriage? Or even four?’ he asks in a piece in the Graph. Can you imagine my thrill? Yes! Yes! Yes! No more stifling, artificial monogamy, not practiced by Poor Little Rich Gays for a long time, in fact ever, even those in Civile (that’s the Latin for Civil Partnership). Instead a rich web of relationships… out with grim, repressive Fricka, the Norse Goddess of Marriage; in with something more complex, new and dangerous.

On one point this nameless Premium Catholic is a little wonky. He says Gay relationships are physically,  spiritually and mentally damaging. I suppose he’s thinking of only two which is why he’s so keen on broadening things out, but he’s wrong even so. Nobody knows better than a Poor Little Rich Gay of love’s fragility, that at any moment he might be called upon to begin all over again, to self-invent from the beginning. Nobody is less likely to succumb to the delusion of perfect love, of guey-coo-ey, handy-holdy, to cling on endlessly, whimpering, to the wreckage; nobody is more likely to know that, finally, there is nothing but knowledge and that knowledge might be awful, both of the other and himself, but it is love’s only stony, hard foundation. Nobody is more likely to know the tussle between power and love; the drive to achieve, the urge to love – which comes first?  Both, in the end, will let you down.

At last I can bring in Gottërdammerung, seen almost a month ago, cast live from the Met. The Ring, supposedly conferring infinite power on whoever possesses it, brings only death and conflict and anyway can be snatched off the hand by a passer-by. Siegfried’s great love for Brünnhilde  is dissolved in a second by a memory-obliterating drug. Peace is only achieved through the return of the Ring to the Rhine, to from whence it came.

But the whole thing will start up again. Somebody will come by and get that Ring off the Rhinemaidens and the whole thing will start all over again.

Magnificent and noble, Wagner’s great panorama, indescribable without the great transforming power of the music, is never in the slightest bit depressing.

So the Poor Little Rich Gay stands gaunt at the graveside in top frockage and sees it all.