Thursday 26th November 2009

Last Saturday: Anthony Mottram gains Gatwick from Prague. He was at Prep with Marcus. Where there were all kinds of goings-on. We continue by train to Brighton.

Marcus, as you know, is England’s leading clock mender.

Brighton, if you are in US or foreign, is a seaside town 50 miles from London: population, 50% retired actresses, 50% gay men and lesbians.

Also, if you are in US or foreign, you won’t have a clue what a Prep is.

Strolling in lashing seaside wind and rain, before Marcus’s party, who should we run into but Eddie Sedgewick, the artist and Brighton resident, looking radiant – fresh, blond, blue-eyed, tanned, modern front slick of hair, 55, 6’2” – just been to H& M to change a black hooded top from size SmallXX to size SmallX. Said the only other customers were teenagers. We retreat to the Mock Turtle, a repro old-fashioned tea shop for a really good cup. Mottram announces, patting large stomach, that his Prague doctors have declared him under weight. How much? I say, meaning Did you bribe? Anyway he is under medical orders to have a cream tea and so apparently are we. We share a table and by great good fortune our conversation is classic Poor Little Rich Gay insider-information and name-dropping, therefore perfect to be overheard. Eddie is very intimate with an MP. ‘He’s flying back this evening,’ he says. We pick over MPs expenses, all absolutely from the horse’s mouth, the strangers at the table riveted. We move on to Tobago, where we have all been more than once, although it is not really a PLRG destination. But Eddie had drinks there with Jenny Agutter.

Now, we were overnight in Brighton for convenience so that meant a hotel. Hotel, hotel, Hotel du Vin in fact. Full of obstacles and jutting-out edges.  Coming in from the street, you are bang, slap against a pillar and then you’ve got to duck under the stairs. I barked my shin on the protruding bed-frame and my thigh on the slab of glass supporting the basin in the bathroom. It’s funny because I once really whacked my shin badly on a garden seat at the Villa Igiea in Palermo (beautiful hotel, by the way, but now part of a chain, I hear). Maybe this is how I will meet my end, done in by a hotel.

But Marcus Cargill’s party! We battle through the weather in a taxi to a very smart part of Brighton. Champagne, canapés, staff, Prince Dmitri Hersov, friends of the Smallmeal/Limpneys, Bruce MacBain. Talking to Marcus’s childhood friend, we fall into chronic envy of the Cargill res. Everything of the very best, the antiques, the paintings, the rugs. Being England’s leading clock mender, of course, the clocks, but also precision engineering applied to the hanging of pictures, the finish, the placing. Marcus is pure Poor Little Rich Gay when it comes to the home. In the last twenty years he has renovated six. He’s there, with his engineering degree, his instruments, grooming the builders in the Poor Little Rich Gay direction. And the results are superb, always. I can hardly bear the thought of my own crumby home.

Up and down the stairs was crawling a small boy of seven in a dress. Apparently he had been insistent. All day he had been saying, ‘I must wear a dress for Marcus’s party’.  Do you know, otherwise, it was almost normal, not Poor Little Rich Gay at all – friendly Brighton gays, one the world expert on where to get the cheapest leccy, family, children, neighbours, Marcus’s welcoming, totally non-snob partner, simple home-made canapés (but served on antique Delft plates, it is true), extraordinary lack of arse and warp. ‘Are you going to make a speech?’ Mottram asked. ‘Oh, no, I’m not grand, like you,’ Marcus replied.