August Not Black – The Wooden Tots Came Back «

August Not Black – The Wooden Tots Came Back

Wednesday 7th September 2016

Before August evaporates I must capture its failure to be black. August used to be the dread month of Death for Poor Little Rich Gays and Tuscany the only solution. But this year only the Multis persisted with Tuscany: 3 weeks in the villa for 16, just themselves mostly. To be in London in August was not thinkable: yet from 10th to 25th August I was in residence. And not black. On the contrary, I was pushing back at life teeming and surging in: Harry Rollo gave a perf and afterwards boarded a private yacht at Livorno (or somewhere along that coast): I heard that their Corsican villa was threatened by a bush fire in the middle of the night and they had to evac: but were saved. Then there was Merle Barr’s last minute dinner and the Olympic cycling craziness, further Proms and Princess Irina’s birthday (she said she was 150: I thought older). We closed Glyndebourniana this year in the pouring rain: it was B and B by B. That’s Beatrice and Benedict by Berlioz: quite new to me: thoroughly approved: clever adaption of the original, incredible mu: quite new. One day I was prostrate: terrible unexplained nausea and couldn’t go with Robert Nevil to a play at the King’s Head Theatre written by a cookery writer about his Gay horror life years ago. Terrible tragedy and sluttery.

Finally there was the Bank Holiday in the Far West with the Gay Mother. Aunt Lavinia came to stay with her new dog, not reliable as to lavatory indoors: an indoor pissing dog, possibly. Well, it was all rather marvellous in the end. Aunt Lavinia’s new dog (a rescue creature, six years old, said to be overweight) was an asset to the abbey: I like these Bull Terriers, provided they’re not white with pink eyes. The black or brown ones are some form of pre-dog, before they’d quite worked out how a dog should be. Engagingly primitive, quite slow and shuffling, with snorting; apparently amiable and not flapping about like any maddeningly busy small dog.

Our country existence was the Wooden Tots, complete with Spotty Dog (well, English Bull Terrier in dark brown) and two elderly ladies as Mummy and Daddy. Bathed in sunshine, as in the 1950s when it was family life, sun always shining, digging potatoes, picking runner beans, dead-heading the cosmos and the dahlias. A trug and wheelbarrow country life, a dream of rural simplicity for reasonably well-off people. On the Friday we lunched with an old lady friend of Aunt Lavinia’s, 90, richly left, living by the sea. Her son was taken over the main house: she’s been in a new-build stately home fragment for 18 years. Her gardeners laboured while we lunched. ‘How long since your husband… Lavinia?’ she inquired. ’10 years,’ was the reply. ‘ ‘It’s just us ladies now,’ she said, not displeased.