Tuesday 17^th November 2009

‘Pick up the phone!’ Simon Limpney, of Massivebury, huge in the cat world, shrieked in about Phase Two of terminating me. Perhaps I was being just a little bit tiresome, complaining of lack of engagements – but a sacking offence?  How would he have put up with Her Late Majesty Princess Diana maundering on?  Do you remember the Squidgygate Tapes? Now, a kind reader has taken a similar line re: my last entry on my blank Saturday: don’t be so passive. Invite, be a mover and a shaker.

As it happens I bore my blank Saturday with calm and fortitude.  And, believe me, I can diarise with the best of them. What’s more I have another blank Saturday forthcoming, on December 5^th.  Will I fill it? Or will I weakly succumb? We’ll have to wait and see.

Yes, I am a mover and a shaker. But, just as Delia (yes, I do mean, Smith. You remember: huge feud with Angus Willis. We have plans afoot to wreck her Christmas book) as she trails through her dreary Norfolk existence can have little sense of being the legendary food writer she is proclaimed to be on a poster in John Lewis announcing a forthcoming book-signing, so I might periodically lose touch with the knowledge borne by others that I am a kingpin, style icon and altogether astonishing personality.

But moments of weakness, you know, are a virtue. They must be prized and woven into the life of any Poor Little Rich Gay. Without them, we would be hard and glazed like the Earls’ Court gays who visit the dentist often for teeth bleaching which produces an unfailing, penetrating radiant smile. The Earls’ Court gays are rich, their apartments are done, they are often Australian or otherwise foreign, but that’s all in the past; they have gorgeous boyfriends who may or may not be kept, flats on the French Riviera; they have a good time in the same determined focused way that they progress up the career ladder in marketing, PR or ‘finance’. They don’t want too much information getting in their way. They know what they like and what they don’t. They want to belong,  they would hate to be thought camp or silly although a certain amount of controlled wildness is permitted.  Confidence as a characteristic rather than a mood they prize greatly.  They are capable of describing themselves as confident.  They have clear ideas as to what is an acceptable level of income. Their steely gaze blanks a great deal out including nature.

Perhaps that was the trouble with the Smallmeal/Limpneys. In the end they were not true Poor Little Rich Gays. Although there was that  time at E&O (it’s a restaurant: pacific rim?) when the waitress poured the tea in an arch, fancified way from a great height but the result was the sound of pissing and Limpney and I were  unable to speak for ten minutes. It was beyond laughter: it was more of a seizure.

But later there were the cats. There’d be a call: one of them was in the coal cellar. Limpney’s jaw would harden. ‘I’ve got to get back to Massivebury at once.’  Smallmeal went the same way. When I first knew him, in the late 90s, it was understood that he was one of those brilliant businessmen who had achieved a totally clear desk – delegate, delegate. He would diarise night and day. We were quite a little gang, Robert Nevil, Sebastian Archer, the Multis and Smallmeal.  Then his mega landfill company was bought up by another mega landfill company and he became an employee as well as the head of landfill (or whatever) in this country. After that, it all started up, the Earls’ Court mode, the regimented focused life, the exclusion of weakness, the diary organised around Limpney’s cat shows, and so forth.

Do be at China B, John Lewis, Oxford Street and boo!