Thursday 17^th September 2009

 I’m not well-disposed towards the Elton Johns.  That place they’ve got near Windsor looks like a girls’ school. Such an undistinguished building could not possibly be inhabited by people of taste or discrimination.  What a nerve to appoint themselves head gays and queen of queens!

 The photographer Multi once graphed David Furnish, though, and liked him.

 Now they are besotted by a 14-month-old baby in a Ukrainian orphanage and want to adopt. But the Ukrainian authorities are saying: gay adoption not welcome. You never know though, with people like this. They can find a way round anything.

 Do they know what they’re doing?

 An Edwardian lady was dressed for church. She thought some matching children would be charming and sent for one in blue and another in yellow. At premieres Joan Crawford (now known to have been a wicked mother) always released her children from the limo a good while before she herself emerged. She then made a huge performance of greeting and kissing them as if she hadn’t seen them for ages.  Nicole Kidman, at a charity premiere of The Hours I went to with the Multis, petted an adorable child but, owing to her frockage and shoes, was unable to walk unassisted.

 Children can be a delightful decorative adjunct.  And the best sort of children are camp and crazy and unlimited and fit perfectly into the Poor Little Rich Gay scene. Only on Sunday I visited the blond Multi’s mother. After lunch seven thousand of her ten thousand grandchildren appeared. One had made a cake like a fantastical sea-creature. It was chocolate studded with alarming bright blue chips, fruit pastels and edible snakes. There were two boys of outstanding eccentricity last seen by me as triumphant, under-age (and I mean about three or four) drivers of quad-bikes at high-speeds.

 But this plan of the Eltons won’t do. Don’t forget Mottram and Robert Nevil and I are familiar with the orphanage world. I can just imagine the scene. These children are very affectionate as well they might be, being starved of affection. But to uproot one and put it in that girls’ school. I don’t think so.

 It’s hard to believe they’ve thought the whole thing through.

 As it happens I don’t approve of gay adoption. Children need a mother. But I’ll admit the double daddy option is a better alternative to a children’s home where no straight parents are available.  From the other side as it were, I fear this trend towards uniformity. What’s the point of being gay if you’re going to do all the things the straights do?