Sunday 13^th September 2009

 Did you see Toby Young in The Spectator last week on the infinite superiority of holiday cotts in Cornwall honed for the gay market – spotless lavs, Agas, ‘walk-in’ fridges, no new pine furniture? What a coincidence that Prince Dmitri Hersov, as you might already have heard, should have launched out last Friday in the Porsche, in the opposite direction as it were, for a Stag Weekend in Eastbourne.

 By the way, I must adjust my rude remarks about accountants’ lack of frockage and flowers in yesterday’s posting, ‘The Gay Mother Gives me a Mine’. Prince Dmitri, as you know, was at the accountancy school and is now with a huge firm doing hush-hush work but anyone more stunningly got up for the office would be hard to imagine. Really, we can’t have people bursting out of their stereotypes like this. It’s an Edwardian look – complicated built suits, many buttons and flaps, heavy shoes, cuff-links like the Multis. But the colleagues are a mystery. At work, the Prince was once watching afternoon television – because his very silly, queenly friend, Thomas Blaikie, was appearing to promote his even sillier book about the Royal Fambly. Other accountants gathered round: ‘You have dinner with people like that, do you?’ they said.

 But the stag weekend… It has been suggested that Prince Dmitri should have refused the invitation , but let it not be said that gays shy away from other walks of life. In any case, he found the experience interesting, even enchanting, but bizarre. The hotel was a kind of hostel. Rooms were shared. At clay-pigeon shooting, Dmitri was the only one to score 0 out of 25. Everywhere they went there was nothing but other stag parties of varying size and horror. All meals, including dinner, were taken in Wetherspoons (I’m really not bothering to check the spelling) on account of the Sport TV.  I didn’t know that stag parties were so basic, did you? All the men on this one were well-off and not especially young. Most intriguing was the evening strip-club. Members of other stag parties paid £40 for a private show, then pounded out of the club to the cash machine for more private shows. What were they were getting out of this? No touching, no wanking, obviously. In gay clubs go-go boys etc are there to inspire congress amongst the clientele either on the spot or later. This plainly not the case with the stag party. Some of the staggers apparently fell into a despair or joy of drunkenness and were observed by the Prince vomiting over walls etc.

 In the meantime, Laura Malcolm is withering away after her first Gay Holiday in Tuscany with the Multis. We have been wondering how hets would respond to a Gay Holiday and now we know. Never before had her surrender to pleasure been so complete (that can’t be entirely true, but there we are…). Back in London, she cannot adjust to normal life. I have to say, even though she’s got an elliptical island unit designed by Bruce MacBain and a built-in cappuccino machine that speaks, three children do generate an enormous amount of ironing.

 What would be the effect, therefore, of a stag weekend devised by Poor Little Rich Gays for straight men? Endless role play to get the tone just right – this is how you banter with staff, this is how you complain, this is how you acquire interesting friends who aren’t mates.  This is how you become a multi and avoid being an employee. No Kenneth Williams, you understand. That would be quite wrong.  There would be ruthless gym work-outs and a talk from my friend, Edward Jasper, on bed linen and bed-making, just to get it clear that you can never have too much detail.

 Exposure to the free, headlong, material, made-up world of the Poor Little Rich Gays (you’d have to bring in Val, whether sober or not, to do his rendition of the wax cylinder recording of Adelina Patti) could be fatal. How many of these straights would ever look back?