Monday 3rd June 2013

Yes! The downstairs table at Nopi, the Exotic Garden at Great Dixter  – these small spaces that shatter the world. Maybe 10′ by 6′ – so a Superking bed size really – but the downstairs table at Nopi has had the impact of a meteor upon the Earth. Food will never be the same again. Sprung from the womb of Ottolenghi, which Poor Little Rich Gays were ready to renounce six months ago, but have as suddenly re-embraced, Nopi is the rare, high-end incarnation of Ottolenghi, definitely an evening restaurant in London’s West End. Small plates, of course, perhaps of sea-figs wrapped in Yataan banana leaves, air-dried, pickled pineapple with Maltese mackerel cooked in beetroot wine. The plates are so exquisite and finely wrought you have to concentrate most hard to catch them as they fleet.

Eight World-class Poor Little Rich Gays were gathered around the downstairs table the other day for lunch. It is actually a slab, raised high (you sit on stools), as much for the examination of the food as the eating of it. You can book the whole thing or share with strangers. It is enough just to be world-class Poor Little Rich Gays at the downstairs table at Nopi. Nothing more is required, other than the lifting of fork to mouth. I sat with Valèry Duplessis (Conrad had gone to Brussels to address the European Union) and we compared notes on management of the home spice cupboard and the state of the banks. Valèry runs a superb kitchen at home and reins in a bank by day. His work is maintaining order in a bank – I don’t mean just a branch of Lloyds, either.

After Nopi , we went round to a gaffe where Bruno-France Bruno, the great mystery Poor Little Rich Gay, is currently staying while his own flatti is being renovated. We had chill-out after Nopi. This gaffe is absent-architect-owned and designed, very high-end, known to many other Poor Little Rich Gays independent of Bruno-France Bruno and much loved as a setting for porn movies. On the way there, in Soho, we saw a dainty police horse doing ballet on its own while the policeman-rider was getting a latte at Café Nero. In the gaffe, we settled on sofas and Bruno-France Bruno bought champagne. Then he appeared waving a framed painting. We had to guess who it was by. ‘Picasso’…’Utrillo’… ‘Hildegarde of Bingen’… Some suggestions were a little wild. It was a Bonnard, of course. Rufus Pitman explained that his cleaner is called Vaselina and has been with for years. I had a crisis because I am cruel to my cleaners. We sang some Brahms and some Schubert. We said to Harry Rollo, who is tending more and more towards music in his world-loved and known public performances, ‘Play the Liszt.’ So he played the Liszt. There was a convenient piano. Then I said, ‘Play Schubert’s Impromptu No 3’. So he played Schubert’s Impromptu No 3. Then I sang the Chinese opera and a song by Brahms, including when it goes into the minor key. I don’t think I much mention my singing. My voice is particularly huge at the moment. Harry Rollo always says, ‘I know what he’s singing.’ But then he has special musical gifts. Others are rude: ‘It could be anything.’ In fact my feeling for the true note grows day by day.

Bruno-France Bruno opened a fifth or sixth bottle of champagne and said that Olga Borodina once got into the gaffe by mistake. She’s a famous opera singer, by the way. She took the wrong lift, because in this block where the gaffe is the lift pitches you straight into the apartment. Alexis Colby-Carrington had the same arrangement in Dynasty you may remember, but no power apparently to prevent just anybody  pitching up in her lounge area for appalling confrontations. The architect-owner of the gaffe, however, shoo-ed away Olga Borodina, who was possibly still in the building, lodging in another flat. We wondered if she would sing but instead Harry Rollo sang ‘Casta Diva’ but with different words – or really just one word, which was ‘homosexual’.

Reggie Cresswell, the internationally known and loved Ghanaian Ceramicist (recently Jamie Cullum declared himself a fan), wondered when he had first met me, Adrian Edge. Strange, because he always was what he afterwards became even before he had become what he afterwards became, when seen by me, Adrian Edge, for the first time, 35 years ago, flitting across the back part of a parlour in an Oxford lodging house.

Fancy Ballet Police Horse Seen In Soho

Fancy Ballet Police Horse Seen in Soho