Monday 12th October 2015

Last Tuesday was the Private Fundraising Breakfast at the Royal Academy followed by a private art historian-led tour of the Ai Wei Wei Exhib. Aunt Lavinia met the man who organises the breakfasts in the street – she did know him from country landed connections. She was asked and allowed to bring a plus one and now we’re on the list! This is the fourth private breakfast we’ve been to, but it’s becoming embarrassing how untraceable are the funds that they’ve raised from us. One time, at the breakfast for the Summer Exhib last year, we saw a terrifying battle-axe in a floor-length blue coat-cardy, huge blouse bow at the neck and merciless nun’s shoes writing a cheque. I sidled up and observed that it was for £25,000. Well, they need £4 million so even a few hundred would be a bit of an insult. This time, Royston King was there!  He is hugely influential and is to be invested by the Queen this week. I always wondered whether he would not loom at one of the breakfasts and finally he did. It was inevitable. At once he and Aunt Lavinia got acquainted. She said she was looking forward to the tour. Royston said he wouldn’t be listening to a word. She said, ‘But you might learn something.’ He said, ‘I can make up my own mind.’ ‘Aunt Lavinia said, You might get it wrong.’  ‘You’re quite strong-minded, you Landed types,’ Royston said. We were never slave-owners, Thank Goodness. Royston, you see, is descended from slaves. Indeed we were stopping slave ships after the trade was abolished. That’s how the Admiral rose up. But often the ships were flying false flags and there was nothing he could do. So after that, Royston and Aunt Lavinia were friends. He was able to point out some important names, such as the Chairman of Fortnums, a member of the Weston family, as well as various other Heads I now can’t recall. But it was me who saw Anna Ford and Baroness Patricia Rawlings, of whom Royston had not heard – so what must she amount to?

Royston was the chance encounter at the Royal Academy and Lansdowne Reindorp similarly I ran into at Christie’s for the Duchess of Rutland’s launch. This is what it means to be in society. You go to a high place and there are people you know. What could be more thrilling!

I’ve quite run out of time to tell you about the Ai Wei Wei exhibition itself. Only the society surrounding it. Royston proposed that he is an artist made by the state. What would he have been otherwise? The Chinese Government encouraged him to build a studio at Shanghai, then, when it was finished, said he’d contravened planning regulations and cheated on taxes. They bulldozed the studio and Ai Wei Wei made a kind of tomb thing out of the rubble with a piece of antique Chinese furniture visibly embedded in it. ‘Well, an artwork came of it,’ Royston remarked.

Artwork by Ai Wei Wei Made out of Inadequate Reinforcing Rods in Government Buildings that Caused Severe Impact and Loss of Life in an Earthquake that Could have Been Avoided

These Trees are Placed to Form the Shape of China and You can Wonder Freely all Over, Unlike in the Real China

Ai Wei Wei – His Dad’s Old Chair, Done in Marble. Dad was a Poet, Persecuted in the Cultural Rev. V Important to the Artist

Outdoor Installation of Trees at the Royal Academy by Ai Wei Wei