Thursday 10th October 2013

I’ve actually been very quiet since the weekend dinners although this eve I go to the opening of a Tower Block, on behalf of Dainty Lady TV, and then the Diana film, privately.

Laura Malcolm gave a large heterosexual dinner. O’Halloran Ta´óesch´Marsh came in from the Daily Mail. We throbbed with expectation in view of the Miliband Crisis. Paul Dacre, he said, refuses to leave his house. He’s awfully shy. Also, I suspect can’t be arsed. The Daily Mail is the Daily Mail and what can we do about it? Readers of the Daily Mail are readers of the Daily Mail. Clearly now there will be no apology although it was quite wrong to put a headline saying that Milly’s father ‘hated Britain’ just because he was a Marxist.

Otherwise O’Halloran was rather subdued, tactically I’m sure. But Charis Cameron, formerly married to a massively huge pap, now with O’Halloran, had a fabulous run on Foxy Knoxy. Guilty. Conversation sparkled at the table. Such happiness.

The next night, I went to Palm Beach. Well, the Bayswater Road actually, where Lansdowne Reindorp and Rocky Masters have taken back their palatial apartment after a prolonged spell in New York and Palm Beach. Lansdowne’s taken a massive City job and Rocky’s commuting from Palm Beach where he runs a gracious business. In London they give an international feel. There was a cute couple over from Palm Springs, the younger of whom had a Fifties quiff. They’d all run into the Multis at the Battersea Decorative Arts Fair that morning.

Lansdowne sits at the head of the table and brings people in, which you rarely see done these days. Somehow I was telling them all about Val and his unsteadiness on my birthday which prevented him getting further than his front door as he tried to board for my birthday outing. ‘He should lose the ‘Val’,’ I heard one of the New York dames growl at the other end of the table. But how could Val not be Val?

Later somebody was complaining that in New York people accept invitations to dinner then don’t turn up if a great Opening or Gala beckons. ‘They won’t know anyone at those things,’ Rocky said. ‘Why bother?’ Oh dear! What’s happening to Poor Little Rich Gays!

Otherwise Lansdowne said he and Rocky had twice been falsely accused. When they first moved into the present Bayswater Road apartment, the previous owner kept phoning up about some shoes she’d left behind. They looked and looked but they weren’t there. Eventually she said, ‘I know you’re wearing them.’ Outrageous. Then Lansdowne’s own mother, who very unfortunately is a ferocious Republican in Australia, bought a Prada handbag in London and left it with Lansdowne for later shipping. ‘Of course you’ll use it,’ she said. ‘I know you will.’ Then the cute young man with the quiff said that his mother asked where he and his boyfriend slept when they visited another gay couple in Miami. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked. ‘Well, do you sleep with them?’

She assumed that all Gays automatically orgy if overnighting with each other.