Wednesday 4th June 2014

Robert Nevil, biographer of the Pony Club and leading Poor Little Rich Gay of our time, wished not to mark his 60th Birthday on Monday of this week. I had to point out that the occasion was not about him. It was about Our Nation, Our Sovereign, Her Majesty the Queen, the Pony Club of Great Britain and his valued inner friends. So an intimate dinner was arranged to take place at my home.

Robert Nevil arrived doing a wicked impersonation of a very old person with limbs flying in all directions. Eight figures, including me, Adrian Edge, were assembled to do homage, amongst them some whose presence might give rise to surprise. Oh yes, very slowly, great plates are shifting as agonising feuds draw to their close.  Robert Nevil, so all-embracing and paradoxical himself, even contemplated including the Multis despite the horrors and wrong of the past. Poor Little Rich Gays suffer more than others, eschewing the full, normal life, but, at the last, heal and cleanse, while remaining impossible.

Robert Nevil was born one year to the day after the Coronation of Her Sovereign Majesty the Queen and in ways that may not be obvious has throbbed, like her, at the heart of English life ever since. Scampering and skittering, irreverent, naughty, gossipy, scholarly, with deep feeling running deep out of sight, he was brought up with dogs and at times as a dog, competing on the floor for scraps thrown down by his mother for labradors and off-spring.  Later he was wounded at Prep and Public and in other vales of suffering into creation. By further telling coincidence, his 60th year falls on the 100th Anniversary of the start of the 1st World War, an event central to Robert Nevil’s imagination.

Robert Nevil’s new book will be a deep and fearless probe into the heart of Englishness. For him England is a school-masterly figure circa 1890 in a tweed get-up on an earnest wild-flower-spotting walk, accompanied by a divine blue-eyed golden youth whose fate is the Trenches. Passions run deep and buried but above there is much nonsense and dressing up as foreign lady Royalties in the evenings, while the wives provide cocoa. I feel sure that Her Present and Sovereign Majesty would understand. Herself a simple country lady, by nothing more than by accident of birth the throbbing burning heart of Our Nation. In her private person, witty, self-deprecating, seeing the funny side, in her public person the thundering embodiment of the Majesty of England.  In this very week, we see the heart of England. It is the 70th Anniversary of D-Day when our Great and Glorious Nation, accompanied by the United States of America, liberated Europe from  Evil for ever. At the same time, the Queen has this morning opened Parliament. Enthroned, emblazoned in 40 million pounds’ worth of jewels, she read a speech about how the Government aims to improve the removal of plastic bags. Only in England such nonsense and solemnity at once as Robert Nevil has achieved too in his life.

Before dinner, in the drawing room, I made a speech, read out owing to the height of emotion. Robert Nevil, needless to say, barracked: ‘I didn’t say I was difficult. I said you’re difficult.’ But he did. He said, some years ago, ‘It’s amazing we’re still friends because I’m so difficult.’ I was able to mention, of course, that, from the Poor Little Rich Gay point of view, not being difficult is Death’s equivalent. My utterance culminated in us all joining to sing ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ and there was not a dry eye … Later we sang Happy Birthday and Jerusalem. The Sheep Cake from Waitrose (Robert Nevil was also brought up with sheep) made a splendid entrance with champagne-bottle candles and  a 6 and an 0. I hadn’t expected much of the cake but it was disappointing that it was vile. Also the sheep wooly icing fell off all over the floor. The dinner itself was greatly aided by Joshua Baring, of the youth branch of the Poor Little Rich Gays, doing two of the courses and greatly impressing and heartening older guests with his particularity as to pastry and pasta-making. He is to attend a One Direction concert this Sunday, it should be added. All the same, I would commit sui over a failed dinner dish as over nothing else and my requirement of perfection increases with age. I hardly dare now to cook a chicken.

But after two days, this great and momentous occasion, the 60th Birthday of Robert Nevil, begins to glow and will live forever more in memory.