Thursday 24th July 2014

You’ll have noticed I have achieved an ideal state of a machine carrying out engagements. Friday 11^th July was dinner with Dennis Tanner from Coronation Street.  He was utterly charming and not at all like Dennis Tanner.  Aunt Lavinia was present at the dinner given by Peter Acharya and Ned Czernowski and went to great lengths to conceal that she had never watched ‘Coronation Street’.

Saturday 12^th I took ‘Boyhood’ with Laura Malcolm and Matt Driver at a cinema. It is a three-hour film about a normal boy growing up. The unique feature is that the actors grew in real time the same as in the film which is the first 18 years of the boy’s life. It was hard to sustain interest in people so ordinary (unlike Grace Monaco). Strangely, though, I was fascinated… as well as deeply bored.  There was always hope that the meaning of life would be revealed. The boy constantly encountered adults who thought they knew best. ‘You’ll never get anywhere in photography without discipline,’ the dreary photography teacher hectored. A nicer lady said to him when he left High School: ‘You’ll meet your sort of people at College. It’ll all work out.’ In the closing scenes he gains College and meets some people who like to go out in the wild and scream.

Sunday 13^th Bruce McBain gave a lunch. He’d barely cooked his salmon but it worked.

On Monday 14^th I attended a launch at L’Escargot in Soho. Some of the Earls Court Gays from years ago re-surfaced. Taudanant, who frocked Diana, was present and Skippy Lancaster also. The crush was so great the waiters could penetrate with neither champagne nor canapés. Strange how a poison can gas an occasion. Somehow there was that nasty Earls Court taste although Taudanant and Skippy are perfectly charming. On Tuesday I dined privately at home with a musical lady who said that a friend was so rich he didn’t know his own National Insurance number. Wednesday was the Grace Monaco film, followed by Joshua Baring at Rosa’s Thai Restaurant and then at his club, Quo Vadis. He told how an important widow (her husband’s interviews are all-time classics), even though over ninety, was quick enough to get the phone slammed down the minute she’d denounced the ghastly Dhiren Dutta as a prick.  Well done! old girl. Patrick Lockyer has had further adventures, never quite coming to fruition,  shall we say. The truth is Patrick and Joshua should marry without further delay and become what they afterwards became. It’s no use questing for the perfect boy.