Thursday 8^th October 2009

A triumphant dinner at the Multis last night. Lord Arrowby was induced to attend and did. For most gays the ideal lover is a handsome straight doctor. This he more and more resembles, without actually being a doctor of course – especially in his suit, direct from the corridors of power, energised and freed by work. We shared a taxi back. I did suggest that his apartment might be the final destination; we could dispense with bit where I went on alone to my home. But he said he had to meet the Home Secretary first thing in the morning.

This answer was encouraging. Maybe in another ten years….And the glamour of the Home Sec! Can you imagine? Something absolutely purring and reassuring and cosy about it all…

The others: the blond Multi’s sister and her husband. Outstanding. Some gays won’t have straights but not all of them are leading full normal lives, you know. These certainly aren’t. Persephone says the most devastating things in a dry drawl as if she were reciting instructions for assembling an Ikea item from a flatpack. She dislikes goat cheese; given it at a Kensington dinner, she rushed into the lav to throw up. Only it wasn’t the lav, it was a cupboard full of fur coats. Vivien, who is something absolutely huge in the City, once dragged his teenage daughters out of bed in 4 in the morning to catch a flight for the ski slopes. But he’d got the day wrong. So they had to be re-dragged the next night and, since the clocks changed that day, the hour for elevation was 3 rather than 4.

As it happens, the Multis’ table was a picture, absolutely perfect, very simple and unpretentious.  There’s a photo of it below. Yesterday, if you recall, I rather gave up in the subject of table settings. The truth is it is a stone I have left unturned. But gays do style the table, they really do. Often it’s worth it. Once I had lunch with the eccentric opera critic, Seamus O’Reilly and the table was heaped with the most stunning antique engraved glass. It really was a sight.

The danger is, and the reason why people like Laura Malcolm will go raving mad at the mention of the subject:  your table can end up looking fussy and common as if it’s been transported direct from the shop window at Harrods.

But now I think of it, Matt Driver had a mania for underplates in the 80s.

The attraction of the Multis’ arrangement is that their cutlery and napkins date from their pre-Multi days which they scavenged in second-hand shops. Not everything is perfect. Their glasses are simple and not too tall (very tall glasses are suburban; also impractical) BUT the blond Multi said at first they were £9.99 each, then revised it to £29.99. And you’ve got to have a lot of them, as you can see.  Then there’s that marble table, which is some kind of modern classic – not cheap.

My glasses are from Divertimenti – the Asquith range, a sturdy 18^th century goblet design, the biggest one £7.75. You can order on-line.

The best glasses are absolutely plain but not boring; in other words, impossible to find. If they have a thick ridge round the rim, they’re too cheap. Stems are usually the let-down. The rest of it might be all right but the stem will be horribly over-fancy.

Let’s have a list of Don’ts for table decor. On the whole, I prefer Don’ts to Do’s

• Don’t have coloured linen of any kind; only white or cream. And not coarse or fringed or ruched. Antique damask is best,
• No napkins folded into peacock fan shapes
• Nothing wooden on the table – especially ‘cruets’; but salad bowls can be wood (see picture below: where wood is working well)
• Don’t have everything new
• Either matching sets or every glass and plate different – which you declare a harlequin set
• No hideous clashes – brand-new looking antiques with nooky wooky crafty pottery, for example.
• No fancy cutlery with wooden handles and gold-plate. No yellow metal cutlery either from old school

The Multis very successful Table Decor

Fine Table decor at Peter Acharya and Ned Czernowski's. A candle in each place and see the butter styling