What a Launch to the Autumn Season! Furs and Diamonds in Every Direction «

What a Launch to the Autumn Season! Furs and Diamonds in Every Direction

Sunday 16th September 2012

Just back from the Alice Temperley Show! Yesterday Conrad Matheson and Valèry Duplessis’s party. My God, those Gays have refurbished! Bruce MacBain, private architect to Poor Little Rich Gays, has drenched their interior right through with sheer brilliance. Builders in for nine months.

The finish! – I wanted to slit my wrists.

Diamonds and Ballgowns also this week, with Val. At Buckingham Palace we gazed on Granny’s Chips, as already mensh. Yesterday to the V and A for the ballgowns.

Last Saturday Prince Dmitri’s petit dinêr for the Multis and me. A new way was devised for measuring distance. Where is Chambèry? Prince Dmitri asked. ‘Half way between London and Tuscany?’ the Photo Multi said. From now on all distances to be measured like this.

If this level of engagements continues I’ll have to be re-Tuscanied, prone, in weeks if not days.

On Friday Robert Nevil arranged a visit to the Sally Bowles play in a smelly railway arch near London Bridge. Good though. Was nearly sick in 1st half from blend of stage smoking and suppurating mould smell. Sally Bowles, who was played by Liza Minelli in the film ‘Caberet’, was inundated with engagements and often up all night. But she lived in squalor and had no care for stains or the loveliness of the home – so not really Poor Little Rich Gay.

Afterwards we explored the seething new metropolis of Bermondsey Street, in London’s Borough neighbourhood: so much for recession! Every bar and restaurant packed with young fashionables, like saucepans on a hob, all coming up to a sex boil.

But last Sunday – our bi-annual pilgrimage to Great Dixter – except I have a feeling that, owing to pressure of engagements, we’ve missed the early summer visit. So only annual this year.

Vital – Great Dixter! Great blooming of that monumental bitch and brilliance, Christopher Lloyd, still kept on in the spirit, sweeping aside slight drawback that he is dead. Not just a garden, but for Poor Little Rich Gays, the source of life. Like that dripping tap in the old lady’s garden in Donaueschingen, said to the source of the Danube (dreadful day when she gets drip fixed). Were Great Dixter to go, I doubt that Poor Little Rich Gays could continue, any more than fish without water.

Robert Nevil and I were accompanied by Vic ‘the seed tray’ Housego, on the ground in Stepney for generations, former allotment holder in what is now the Olympic park, gardener to two schools, in boyhood wrongly thought to be German and thereafter erroneously associated with Nazi memorabilia.

Dixter – the outrages and wonder,as always. Magical place, never disappoints. Always thrilling. And so encouraging the paths are a bit tatty. After Dixter I can face my own garden and home.

True greatness does not crush and overwhelm but inspires and soothes and makes the lesser life greater.