Three Dinners, Three Lunches and Rare Snowdrops «

Three Dinners, Three Lunches and Rare Snowdrops

Sunday 3rd March 2013

On Wednesday the Multis gave a dinner for Marcus Cargill, England’s leading clockmender, whose knees are playing up after skiing and Rupert Aubrey and the Bond Dealer who confessed to sometimes not changing the sheets between visitors at their Hove second home. On the whole they’re buckling under the strain of property. I begged the Bond Dealer to save the banks.

On Thursday I travelled by official car (Xenon driving lights)with Aunt Lavinia to Oxfordshire for a private visit to a Stately with a Gainsborough and rare snowdrops. We lunched. In the evening I was with Virgil Grayson who’s been unwell. We dined.

Friday was merely Miroslav re-decorating the hallway and my epic journey by car to Papers and Paints Fulham to fetch more hallway paint taking in a surprise visit with Laura Malcolm and Matt Driver. We lunched. Matt is now at home, finding the days most agreeable and sauntering without the horror of 9 to 5, or 9 to 8 as it was in his case with 1st Class to Peking and a salary exceeding the appalling Robin Smallmeal’s, Head of Landfill in this country or whatever. Still Matt has no patience with Miroslav’s erratic ways such as begging for random sums of money to save his family rather than because he’s finished the tiling. Bruno-France Bruno (always a Picasso in the bedroom, but whose? Our premiere mystery Poor Little Rich Gay) texted me last weekend: ‘I want this man out of life.’ He’s had Miroslav in for a massive refurb. Laura and I are inclined to feel that if you’re middle class (and Poor Little Rich Gay) and want your home tweeked and peaked to unutterable perfection at minimum cost then Miroslav is your fate. With careful management he can be endured.

And his silicone work has improved.

Silicone, I was thinking not so long ago, is the most terrible thing, a reminder of our fallen state and endless yearning for Heaven. I mean, how do you resolve the edges? Your marvellous marble slabs or granite work tops are wiped out just like that by crumby silicone work. And the ghastly smeary stuff is terribly difficult to manipulate and even when rightly done deteriorates.

The Nobel Prize surely for someone who could invent a durable substitute with which any fool could achieve perfection.

Yesterday – oh wonder! – was Conrad Matheson’s 50th Birthday at St John’s Restaurant – of which more later. Oh, so much to tell! Lord Arrowby was there. He used to be my part-time love interest. He couldn’t have been more divine.

Then today the Multis gave a glorious Spring lunch – is there anything to beat the fierce March sunlight, cold but glaring, renewal unstoppable, as it pours into a marble-lined penthouse filled with flowers and art works re-born in the light? Their Russian paintings of bathers were entrancing as never before, although bought many years ago for a song. The Photo Multi is fuming about the Irish Bank which has doubled interest rates without warning. Private contacts are putting him straight through to the top at the FSA. This is to do with their Empire of flats on which the sun never sets (so to speak).