Sunday 15th November 2009
Yesterday I had a blank Saturday. I wasn’t used. When the TV or Radio phone up they say: ‘We want to use you.’ Quite often they phone back later and say, ‘We’re not using you.’ I have transferred the expression to social life. I was supposed to be dining with Arjan Bose and Robert Nevil in Frankie-Doreen Gunn’s basement flat where Arjan is living. But the exquisite young man had made a mistake with his rota – he works in flowers, the hours are odd. Robert Nevil was meant to have told me but, whirled round in pre-publication flurry over the Pony Club book, he forgot. It only came out by chance last week when we were at the Ashmoleum Opening. What’s more, he had already made other arrangements; what’s furthermore, it emerged yesterday, Arjan was after all free and was joining in the other arrangement.
According to Robert Nevil this is what happens if you get involved with the young and decorative – which is what we like to do.
So there it is – a blank Saturday. The worst! Nothing for it but to read some fabulously boring documents to do with my mine. Do you remember about my mine ? Not working yet. Will it ever be? Some weeks ago, you might also remember, I wrote about the absolute centrality of the diary to Poor Little Rich Gay life. You must have a diary and you must fill it. And Saturdays are the most precious of all, ardently to be filled, only given as the rarest and most special gift. It was somehow the beginning of the end of my friendship with Simon Limpney when I confined in him that I am sometimes unused on a Saturday. He took it very seriously; he thought there must be something dreadfully wrong – with me, apparently.
Now is the prime time of year for the Diary. Run up to Christmas, you know. If you’re not filling up, you’d better do something about it. Smallmeal, I hear, via the Multis is already saying, ‘We’re looking at mid-January at the earliest.’ You need to be able to say, ‘December! You must be mad. The diary’s completely packed.’ Others, so the photographer Multi tells me (and they shall be nameless), have also got pre-Christmas arse and grandeur well underway, with the added touch, always worth including, of no explanation.
When refusing an invitation, just say, ‘Sorry, not free.’
Another more extreme approach was modelled by Simon Limpney. Why not try it? Phone up your friends with the specific purpose of telling them how little you are free. ‘The earliest I can see you is 16th December,’ was what I heard when I picked up the phone at the end of October some years ago.
Above all, never crack, never show the slightest rufflement, never say, ‘But that’s two months’ away. Let’s do it sooner.’ That’s how I got wrong with the Smallmeal/Limpneys. Somehow, I’m not sure how, I crossed the Massivebury diary. ‘We have so many friends, so many people to Massivebury,’ Simon Limpney found it necessary to say to me as he launched Stage One of my termination process, ‘I’ll only be able to see you once a month at the most.’ This was after I’d know him for ten years, during which time, I now realise, Massivebury, metaphorically speaking, had got grander and grander.
No, you must never challenge the diary. Poor Little Rich Gays are easily frightened. If we lose control of the diary, what then? Besides, if you show even the tiniest glint of weakness, you might be showing us too much of ourselves.
RSS Feed
We never have this problem as we’re twins – or if we do, we just cook for each other.
What an excellent solution to the problem!
Could you not be more proactive and arrange an event yourself? You paint yourself as passive – waiting for the next invite. I thought you were a mover and shaker – in which case you would take control?
I wonder if others attempt to dispel the illusion of (occasional) isolation by singing hymns and operatic ditties, as Edge does. Especially when a high colaratura is succeeded by a roaring baritone, often in an unrelated key, the sense of a happy throng can be easily achieved, and shame in front of the neighbours niftily avoided.
Oh yes! I’ve filled the diary quite well for December in fact.
At the end, we are all alone
we enter the world alone, we leave the world alone. Might as well get used to it.
You could support your local football team on a Saturday afternoon. Then, after returning from the terraces all you would want to do is grab something to eat, and curl up in front of the telly to watch Strictly Come Dancing and X Factor, in fact you would be totally spoiled for choice as I’m a Celebrity – Get me out of here has just started. No need to see anyone until 2010, and you would be in big demand
We endure and weave and face it all in designer clothes
It is perhaps a tragic limitation that being a Poor Little Rich Gay precludes this. But I do enjoy seeing the team coach sweep up the end of my road to the Arse Emirates Stadium
The “Arse Emirates” is a nice bit of lopping. But it would be quite misunderstood in West London, the home of gay football, where fans of Queen’s Park Rangers happily urge Rangers forward with cries of “UP THE Rs”.
I had no ideah
May I just add, in case anyone thinks from the above that Adrian is incapable of being socially proactive, or that I wholly and ruthlessly abandoned to weekend solitude, that he in fact popped round to the Nevil mansion for lunch on Sunday. This may have been frugal, rustled up at v short notice and in the grip of a hangover, but it appeared to give pleasure. No standing on ceremony or brandishing of diaries or even (dare one say?) any great expenditure. So, if you are stuck at the weekend, a prey to the solitary state and its attendant vices, just ring up an old friend and invite yourself round.
Yes, this is true!