Saturday 5th January 2013

I’ve been laid low. It’s as if the whole of 2012 has reared up and overwhelmed me. What a year! Not the wracking agony of Autumn 2008 when, hunched in that drawing room in Tobago, we watched on TV the Index clacking down 10 points a minute. We faced wipe-out.

But now, the long slow post-viral fatigue. We need growth and better news for rich people.

On the other hand, will we ever again know such a year? The Jubilee and then the Olympics. Harry Rollo’s perf in New York that shook the world. Poor Little Rich Gays, the strain ferocious, wore outfits, seized and shaped, created occasions, knew some brief glorious joy (all that can be expected if one is not to become unbearable) and did not fail.

On New Year’s Eve Conrad Matheson and Valèry Duplessis threw open their Bruce-McBain refurbished home. Recently you’ll have noticed that I’ve had no inner life, have become just a machine run by money that goes to functions in outfits. Well, Conrad’s read Sybil by Disraeli – so there!  I know I’m basking in reflected glory but too bad. Apparently it’s highly camp – Sybil, that is – full of Wildean dialogue and carry-on. What’s more, the talk at the party was all of the latest private crises of the Poor Little Rich Gays.

Oh yes! Never fear. The higher they rise, the more tormented the big balloon they carry behind, out of sight. The great urge to elevate and perfect the life, the horror of the normal life, the numerous exceptions to which the Poor Little Rich Gay feels entitled rarely knit satisfactorily into a union with another as envisaged by society’s great forces. Somehow the Poor Little Rich Gay even is tricked, finds that the Loved One veers away, is excessively pre-occupied with their own decor. Bitterness and disappointment set in, although the truth is the Poor Little Rich Gay would loathe full coupledom as normally conceived.

Harry Rollo, the world-class performance artist and impressario, was in the garden at the party with another world-figure, who rocked our nation to its foundations some years ago with a perf in theatre and on TV. Anthony Mottram, the Prague-based ‘consultant’ with whom I was in uncertain and rich union for 42 years, caught in a rich web of many dimensional relationships but now estranged, was unhinged at a perf of the perf and raged at random members of the audience. It wasn’t so much the depiction of Our Lord Jesus as the loudness of the music.

Anyway, Harry Rollo and the World-Figure were talking about divorce. The World-Figure said he was writing a piece for a singing conger-eel as a consequence. The pay-out, you see. To Harry Rollo, I sang my new Christmas carol (new to me) ‘Thou who wast rich beyond all splendour/All for Love’s sake, becamest poor.’  ‘That’s me,’ Harry said.

For both of them, never again!

Now we come to Lord Arrowby, my former part-time love interest. Head to toe in Dries and other labels, multi-coloured, stalking the corridors of power at such height now no others can accompany. They’re way below.  The Queen, when she took over the Cabinet the other morning, was tart: ‘You’ll get nowhere without Lord Arrowby, you know.’ A small door in Whitehall leads to Lord Arrowby but very few can get through it. Never have the Great Powers seen so much Dries, such an Art Collection, such attendance at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, such a departure from the usual mould (or is it ‘mold’) of back-room person. They love him.

Dear, darling Guy Bostock, Lord Arrowby’s unlikely best friend, could not have been more muscular, free and enchanting. Over Christmas, he’d had Baileys. Dear, precious Reggie Cresswell had spent Christmas with Mrs Cresswell, his mother. Just the two of them and a few drives. Otherwise his conversation was unrepeatable. Valèry was i/c the food. A full 6-part supper with three cake choices to follow plus self-made pâtisserie: ‘world-class’, Harry Rollo said and everyone agreed.