Saturday 2^nd January 2010

The Sales growl on underneath everything at this time of year, rather like those double-basses in old music. I expect you’re wondering what a Poor Little Rich Gay is amongst the reduced goods in the first place.

Well, I’m bursting and seething and slightly anguished but now we’ve had New Year and I went to a marvellous party. It really was. You might have noticed I don’t always enjoy things as I should. It’s a crippledom I have to bear. A large gathering, so many people, one foot wrong, one harsh word – collapse, totally destroyed, days to recover. And New Year – it can be grim, compulsory hilarity etc. One year in Prague with Mottram we went to the creepy dark mansion of the German military attaché (big-time gay in Prague ex-pat circles): loathsome yellow water soup with surprise fish taste; guests actively hostile.

But this party was bliss. Covent Garden, absolutely London’s central, big art on the walls, big names on the floor. Therefore even more remarkable that I, Adrian Edge, who am nobody very much, not crushed underfoot. The hosts: Ariel (known by this name alone), who makes sculptures out of water, string, holograms and occasionally bits of disused council estates, and his partner, Harry Rollo, the impresario, collector and performance artist: star turn – playing Liszt’s piano reduction of The Ring upside down in an artificial snow-storm at the same time trying to get through on the telephone to Zsa Zsa Gabor’s hairdresser. Very alternative, very new, but, make no mistake, very Poor Little Rich Gay. Their house in Los Angeles (yes, I do hope to visit, readers) was recently put in a bag and smoked against the termites. Harry jetted over before Christmas just to see about the curtains.

They’d been to Ottolenghi!  I couldn’t believe it would all fit together so beautifully. A full buffet from Ottolenghi! Can you imagine anything more absolutely new – and expensive? Those bags of meringues alone cost £7.50, I happen to know. And champagne, of course, in waves, every ten seconds or so.

The guests: so talented, so well-known, hardly any employees, but first and foremost clients of Bruce MacBain, all poised to extend and refurbish the home. Stephan Jäger, the international organist and DJ, in Alexander McQueen, has already begun. He returned from a tour before Christmas to find – no stairs. Cut off from his frockage! Had to go out and buy the A McQueen from scratch.

There was nothing wrong with the stairs, you understand; he just didn’t like the look of them.

So it was Out! Out!

Ned Boule, the timpanist, outer garments Uniqlo but a solid foundation of vintage Helmut Lang, has jaws wide open over a property in the City: Bruce MacBain an inevitability, I would have thought. Reggie Cresswell, the Ghanaian ceramicist, just back from Christmas with his Gay Mother, the only black resident of the Cotswolds over eighty, has already had him, though. Rufus Pitman, novelist and critic as we know, wearing Black Orchid by Tom Ford, likewise.

But we were not narrow. There was a range beyond building works – a hot skinhead, for instance, about to go off and study German in that country. I discussed most thoroughly with a woman quite up to the topic, the mania, in California, for pink minges (I’ll explain one day). A Bond girl was, reportedly, bought in under police escort. I never saw her. She might have been kept in a room below (it was an upstairs party, you see), her presence radiating through the floorboards. This is how these things are done in Los Angeles, I believe. But the Very Great Actress, as opposed to the Bond girl, supposedly coming on after her show, was apparently waiting for me, Adrian Edge, to leave before sweeping in.

Unexplained.

Lord Arrowby was elsewhere – either at Lambeth Palace, Downing Street, Sandringham or all three.

But Poor Little Rich Gays couldn’t have been more benign and, although I shouldn’t say it, really awfully flattering to me. You do wonder whether contact with normal people over Christmas hadn’t been rather cleansing. But it couldn’t go on, of course. Or perhaps it was relief, over the holiday, from ghastly work. Work is such a drawback, on the whole.

Vers la fin, some halves slipped away for adventures in clubs, leaving other halves behind. Rufus Pitman said that he has 394 friends on Facebook, but occasionally it drops to 393.

As I was leaving Harry Rollo explained that his perfume smells of the dawn. This party was the dawn. What a year ahead for Poor Little Rich Gays if this is the beginning!