Thursday 18^th March 2010

I’m feeling better – than on Tuesday when you last heard. Even though Miroslav, the Polish builder, phoned with a great, desperate Dickensian tragedy of a failed bank transfer and his boys (that’s the workers) stranded penniless in Whole-born. Could I advance £100? The milk powder for his actual baby son came into it somehow.

Otherwise, car sales are up. Borrowing is down.

For goodness sake, I can’t go on like this.

The vital thing is:  I’ve made a certain phone-call. A person educated not a hundred miles from myself has been farcically lodged all week with Robert Nevil, rather than, as usual, with me. Owing to non-speakers. I went round there before he loomed and ate all the choc.

I forgot to mention that, on Saturday, Robert Nevil and I visited some incredibly rare plant nurseries in freezing Cambridgeshire. At one I was subject to fart gas by the phloxes. Robert Nevil quipped, oh yes, he quipped: ‘Might warm us up a bit.’

Last night, RN and I, accompanied by the youthful restaurant fiend, Joshua Baring (he’s just never out of them. Also has read so many books, but loves Top Man, trash TV and, like the Multis, open-top cars) went to the living rectory in Spitalfields where Eddie Sedgewick’s art show has been housed for the last month. He was to launch into self-written poetry and music to accompany his art, with canapés and wine, on a small paying basis (£20) for a select, invited audience, which included, as it happens, names. In addition to ourselves, of course.

Just what Poor Little Rich Gays should be doing in middle age – veering off in previously unheard of directions. I’m all for it. There was one sad poem and one happier one about the colours: ‘What would I do without pink?’ The whole gallery was turned pink with lighting actually and the music was splurgy and electronic. Very soothing. Something to do with Brian Eno. Have you heard of?

The idea could go further. An event: guests to do a turn.  The only rule: it must be a never-before-tried area. I was going to say: Val and I – our vision of  Adelina Patti from the wax cylinder recording would be perfect. I’m the hissing background and Val, with lav paper and comb, the tiny, faint, French shriek of the Mirror Song from Faust.

He knows all the words which I never do.

But it would be breaking the rules.

All the same, we should be inspired by Eddie Sedgewick. Have such an event. Better than  telly on or conversation. People like a structured activity.

I’ve heard, by the way, that the divine Lord Arrowby, refreshed by his night of lux at Claridges, was taken by Reggie Cresswell to the private view of the Kobke (the ‘o’s got one of those lines through it) Exhibition at the National Gallery.

Now the National Gallery is very much where these two belong. One or other or both will be trustees one day. Poor Little Rich Gays are outsiders but where there is a chance to be an insider, the rule is dropped.

The Queen of Denmark was due but was in bed with ‘flu (I hope not terminal. She’s a smoker, you know. Also her frockage is self-designed). Nevertheless the speeches were prefaced with great flurrying ‘Your Majesties’ and Lord A and Reggie were at their wits’ end trying to spot reigning monarchs lurking in the crowd.