Monday 22^nd March 2010

Ed Jasper, the bed-linen expert and millionaire: Saturday, his dinner party at his London home.

This occasion was diarised before Christmas. Canonbury residence.  We foregather in the drawing room.  Ten dining. Champagne. Brocade, damask, massive swirling gilt mirrors, tapestry cushions, curtains six inches thick, curvaceous French furniture, what are called oil paintings. Everything in absolutely superb condition.

Ed has devoted the last twenty years, although running an exceptionally lucrative business, to décor,  bed linen being a priority.  First of all a huge, semi-derelict castle in Highgate, now town and country places, house and garden. Last summer, you recall, he had the entire top floor of this London demesne re-configured, including new bathroom, specially for his mother’s three-week visit.

Endless, endless work. The result: perfection. Some of the most finished homes known. This is what the very rich achieve: finish. It is the same at Massivebury, the Smallmeal/Limpney country estate, and at the Mottram Museum apartment in Prague. Nobody has gone wiggly with the silicone gun, failed to paint a straight line, left the corners when plastering lumpy.

There’s a nice lady, a country neighbour of Ed’s. She asks me if I got ill after the Wolseley, after our lunch there at the beginning of February. I am astonished. As it happens I did, but some time later. I hadn’t made the connection.  ‘Both ends,’ she said. ‘Thirty hours afterwards. We all went down.’

But apparently there’s no move to sue or even seek lighter redress.

Downstairs the dining room is oak-panelled, dark oak, fully medieval. Only flaming torches on the walls missing. Heavy crystal goblets on the massive round oak table. Gorgeous red lacquer place mats (see graph below). Also downstairs an exceptional medieval lav, or rather a modern one encased in a thunder-box with heavy wooden seat and lid. Outstanding carpentry. Stone floor, of course.

Riordan McFee, TV critic of a leading tabloid newspaper, non-gay, is the star guest.  He is another kind of guest often on breakfast TV. Is sometimes stopped in Park Lane by strangers who want to be graphed with him. He’d like more of that, he says. Tremendous thunderer, against virtually everything – Susan Boyle, Sport Relief, Tim Henman. Handsome though. The gay guests tell him how young he looks and he’s not quite sure what to do with himself.

These gays are in tweeds, possibly not entirely intended, and since last seen by me have gone magnificently bald. Ed used to know all kinds of whippy bitch-slappers in designer frockage but now he’s settled down. Or has he? His setting may be luxe beyond belief but his mouth is elsewhere. The nice both ends lady from the country complimented him on his self-made lemon tart (excellent wholesome, straightforward dinner by the way). ‘I was hoping it would excite your pudenda ,’ he said and she shrieked with thrill as never before. She said her son, that every night in New York, had been invited by Scarlet Johansson, somehow met by chance, to Jennifer Anniston’s party but wasn’t going, was staying in with some mates over from London.

Obviously completely normal.

Ed Jasper's Glassware and Lacquer Mats