Saturday 23rd February 2013

Last Sunday we forged north in my official car with Xenon driving lights  for lunch with the Photo Multi’s mother. What a radiant day! Val came, in a self-made tweed suit, also self-pimped and miraculously relieved of moth-holes.  He’s got a mending drive on. We fetched the magnificent Lady Newell from her manoir at St Mermantrude’s near Oxford. At 83, she’d been in bed for two and a half weeks with a chronic chest infection. Only downstairs on the Wednesday before but by last Sunday fully decorated  for the journey north with scarves and earrings. Her wow-factor was Jackie O sunglasses converted to spectacles. What a bulwark are things when they’re right.  She couldn’t believe the number of roundabouts but loved the power station we passed near the luncheon destination. Six round chimneys, 40 feet in diameter, 600 feet high, with sides curving inward,  at the base plunging directly into the ground without interruption, primitive, terrifying and important, like Henry Moore. Smoking also.

Lady Newell, you might recall, is the mother of Elsa Hodgeman, the Gertrude Stein de nos jours – the one who tried a salary and didn’t care for it. Neither mother nor daughter have ever cared for salaries. Employees never! They know everybody instead. Should there be legal proceedings over a cracked pavement slab, Lady Newell will be represented by the highest imaginable QC. After the War, she got hold of a West End mansion (in the Central of London) where Elsa now lives and where Miroslav by raging coincidence has been painting the double height vestibule.

We gained the elegant Gastro via the nearby Cathedral – a glorious lightening visit. The length and mystery of this Cathedral had not stuck me before. Inside it’s a forest of vaults and pillars, stretching without limit into a blaze of light at the far end. There’s no East Window, but an apse with temporarily clear glass while the stained is being restored. Here, in the choir, Marcus Cargill, now England’s leading clockmender, then a chorister, queened and preened at the age of ten. For in the Close of this Cathedral lies a place of pilgrimage for Poor Little Rich Gays, their fount, it might be said, where it all began. In the Cathedral Choir School, the Abu Ghraib of the Poor Little Rich Gays, were imprisoned in the 60s simultaneously Marcus Cargill and Anthony Mottram, now ‘consultant’ of Prague, as you know currently estranged from me, Adrian Edge,  after 42 years (but a mere 3 years of estrangement), and then, later, Ned Boule, the organist . So it was that from that black well flowered the horror and glory of the Poor Little Rich Gays.

The Multis lavished the lunch and couldn’t have been more skittish and attractive. The Photo Multi, although coughing terribly, was adorably cute. The Blond Multi wanted a 1st course but the Photo wanted more sides.  As a dog with bone, the Blond could not be prised from his 1st course mania, nor the Photo from his sides. How they tussled and lobbed, then plunged into self-knowing giggles, before resuming their lobbing.

The Cathedral Choir School Where Three of Our Number were Hurt into Poor Little Rich Gay Life

The Power Station Liked By Lady Newell, Seen in Wing Mirror by the Photo Multi