Monday 23rd January 2012

Lord Arrowby, my part-time love interest, newly re-kindled,  has regained these shores from India whence the Multis board on Friday (five weeks away) but I’m seething with accounts: did the Gay Mother pay for the hedge-trimming or was it Cousin Phoebe?

And there’s Lady Carmichael – mother of the Blond Multi – her luncheon the Sunday before last. And the Arrowby concession, the astonishing chink in the armour, the sudden earth-shattering semantic re-alignment: ‘if we marry, it’ll have to be separate residences.’ All that to come.

Well, of course, I’d never imagined anything else – separate residences, I mean.  Decor differences have wrecked many a Poor Little Rich Gay alliance.  You see, Lord Arrowby’s a tremendous romantic in a peculiar sort of way. He imagines, and avoids, a vast engulfment, a terrifying wipe-out of togetherness.

But that wasn’t my direction. Last night, Val, still on crutches, nibbling precariously at a bottle of port, having fallen in September while sauced, having sipped, and I took an amateur giving of ‘Saul’ by Handel in a church. It was inspiring to see rich retired people, not decor-driven, good people, raising for charity, and the expressive choral women, having music in their lives. I wrongly sneer. We enjoyed the perf. Val, by birth a Catholic, homed straight in on the shrine to the Virgin at the back of the church although it was C of E. Then he sang a Catholic hymn as follows:

Soul of my Savior sanctify my breast,
Body of Christ, be thou my saving guest,
Blood of my Savior, bathe me in thy tide,
wash me with waters gushing from thy side.

Perfectly revolting.

After that, he told a cautionary tale, recently heard. A woman began by giving up coffee; then she became a vegetarian, before ascending to veganhood. Finally she was a Lesbian prostitute with a heroin addiction.

Here’s a picture of the Multis’ evening bill:

The Multis Under Pressure at La Pont This Evening: They've Got to Get All the Menu Options, Not to Mention Wine Selections, Tasted for The Blond Multi's 50th There in March and They Board for India on Friday, Not to be Seen in This Country Again for Five Weeks

Sunday 22nd January 2012

I did wonder how old Jonny Money (sic) penetrated the Hockney PV. He was a friend of Dr Mun, the scandalous lecturer when Robert Nevil and I were at uni. The one with the Hockney, now I think of it, which I used to Windolene – because it didn’t look as if anyone else was going to. It belonged in fact to Stephen Spender, whose wife, Lady Nat Spender, wouldn’t have it in the house because it was a naked boy

Anyway, Jonny Money sold very good antiques up and down the King’s Road and for years and years I assumed he was dead, but he isn’t. He was found alive by me at the Doctor Mun Memorial Lecture, given by Reggie Cresswell, the Ghanaian ceramacist, in October.

On a visit to the Royal Academy, as an ordinary member of the public, Jonny had noticed something about the doors of the fine rooms. The key-hole covers – they weren’t right, not authentic, false modern additions. He scoured and found one in the right style, got it copied and presented a complete set to the Academy. In return for which, they said, ‘Do come to the PV for Hockney.’

That’s not the end of it. At the PV something else emerged. He observed the hinges of the doors – wrong sort of screws, Phillips screws!

Is this not the path of life-time admission to Private Views at the Royal Academy?

Thursday 19th January 2012

You’ve been waiting 19 days now. It’s intolerable. Lord Arrowby has been my part-time love-interest for 15 years. We’re ideally suited, both Poor Little Rich Gays, therefore consumed primarily with buying art works and our high callings, his to run the country (from behind the scenes), mine to wear clothes and to re-fire the life with words. We must be able to go shopping without notice. We’re both very clear about that. We couldn’t bear a boyf clinging on for dear life.

At Reggie Cresswell’s New Year’s Eve Party, I said to Lord Arrowby, ‘You’re wearing make-up.’  ‘No, I’m not;  it’s weariness.’  He was snappy, of course, as you might expect when Government quarters are accused of powdering and painting. But the tiniest tragic wing brushed over him. He’s given everything  to our Nation and high achievement. ‘Poor Lord,’ I said, feeling terribly his lonely path.

Would love and affection soothe?  ‘Let’s get married,’ I said.  Do you know what? You won’t believe it. Usually he hisses and spits when I propose our union, which I do frequently. But this is what he said: ‘It’ll have to be separate establishments.’

It’s a concession. You must see it. It’s a step… but now I’m thinking – it’s rather like when you hear that some young thing has got an Oxbridge place, ‘Marvellous, but now they’ll have to go there.’

So now I’ll have to marry Lord Arrowby. He’s adorable, of course, and so eligible and suitable… but, oh dear, can I face it?

Enough of this! Here are some pictures of Kai, Mayfair, where I went after ‘The Iron Lady’ with the Multis. They board for India next week for five weeks, two of which are at a health farm where a mud and salt regime is enforced.

If you hear that India has burned down in the near future, you’ll know why.

I shall have to weave as best I can without them.

I put on half a stone after Kai: I’m sure it was because the Blond Multi asked the lady Maitre d’ so many questions, such as where she lives, who the owner is, where he lives, which is the most popular dish on the menu, in addition to ‘No chop-sticks, thank you’ and side-lining of  tiled plinth which was pride and joy of Mayfair Chinese styling  instead of table-mat,  that they cursed.

I haven’t quite finished the Lord Arrowby story, as a matter of fact. When, oh when will he come back from India?

Kai Mayfair: The Multis Didn't Like These Table Mats and Had Them Removed

Kai, Mayfair: Minimal Soup

Kai, Mayfair: Interesting Chive Triangle

Kai, Mayfair, Taken Post-Iron Lady

Kai, Mayfair: I Think of James Bond for Some Reason

Kai, Mayfair: Chocolate Pudding Presentation: Note Upholstery in Background

Kai Mayfair: Chocolate Pudding as Object of Worship: Note Wrought Iron in Background

Thursday 19th January 2011

Ian McEwan. GRAYSON (I said to Royston King, who distributes millions to projects in London: ‘I know him.’ ‘Well, he doesn’t seem to know you.’ )

And Stephen Fry – in brown waxed jacket. Zero frockage

Tuesday 17th January 2012

Well, not quite. But just this minute back.

Jammed up against Sir Caine and Lady Shakira in the crush to get in, she superb for 65.

But Harry Rollo’s already seen it – shown round by the artist!

You must love this exhibit. Vulgar, common, amateur – that’s what the critics will say. But they’ve never been in the countryside.  Nor seen Van Gogh. Nor remember Hockney in the 60s and 70s for what he was, the artist.

Respec’ called for.

I had a quiet word with Jasper in the first room. Royston King used me as his plus one; he distributes millions to restoration projects in London: committees, trustees, head of this, head of that… head of the Museum of Garden History, in fact, head of Dulwich Picture Gallery… all met. ‘You wouldn’t want Vancouver,’ Royston boomed. ‘Quite pleasant to go for the interview… were you in for the V and A?’

Royston asked me how many black people were there. ‘They wouldn’t let me in when I came for the Royal Academy dinner in the summer. Now…’ turning to another, ‘you’re enormously distinguished. I heard Nicholas saying there’d have been no Leonardo without you. He’s giving you the credit….Ah, Sir Ian…. ‘

I said to Sir Ian, I said, ‘We must remember what Hockney did for Gays.’ ‘And you too, what you’ve done for Gays, Sir Ian,’ Royston put in. Sheila Hancock flitted by and that Lord of BP who got into slight eau chaude over an escort. Melvyn, of course, and Nicholas Serota, and the artist of the Olympics, Zandra and SIR BOBLAND GELDOFF, then Andrew Marr (awful shirt).

But the art! the art! You might be horrified but if you know flowers and nature, you’ll see – it’s all right. That’s what flowers really look like, those colours are in nature – almost. And the sheer quantity of it, 4 or 5 large rooms at the Academy just bursting with new work, the energy and exuberance. This is why Hockney went out of fashion – just too fucking delightful.

Sir Bobland was so understanding when the waitress dropped the empty wineglasses. He almost had the vac out. Lord Halifax was seen collecting his bag from the cloakroom, identified for me by head of heritage Yorkshire whom Royston was grilling about the Hockney Yorkshire love life. ‘Gays never stay together,’ Royston declared. ‘My wife went and died on me,’ said Yorkshire heritage, quite socially.

Monday 16th January 2012

I know you’ve been clinging on, clutching, clawing at the cliff edge, tearing your nails: what happened, what happened re: Lord Arrowby, my part-time love interest, at Reggie Cresswell’s New Year’s Eve party? But since then ‘The Iron Lady’ swept in (Mrs Thatcher: it’s complicated to explain why she’s important to Poor Little Rich Gays), after which I dined at Kai, Mayfair with the Multis; last Thursday we took Seth Vaughan’s Nude Art Show at Wimbledon (internecine strife behind the scenes there), then yesterday I lunched with Lady Carmichael, the Blond Multi’s mother, in one outfit but dined at Shoreditch House after Harry Rollo’s astonishing evening performance in another.

Except it wasn’t really a performance; Harry Rollo re-created or created for the first time perhaps the world. Nominally the theme was The Creation of the World. Some audience members were so devastated or uplifted or perhaps both or not knowing which. This is Harry’s genius in his performances: when does one part end and another begin? Can you really be sure? It’s all so taut and balancing on a wire. The first birds and fishes were lights and water bubbles in tubes dancing in patterns of fantastic beauty, on the verge of, but holding back from fever and frenzy. Then there were the tremendous waves of crude oil, threatening but magnificent, and, I may be imagining it, the whiff of crude oil too.

Afterwards we were a table of World class names at Shoreditch House. Reggie Cresswell, the Ghanaian ceramicist, couldn’t take anything crunchy because of his tooth. My other neighbour saw Boris Johnson jogging near Pompeii years ago. I’m always seeing him on his bike near my Official Home, rather than Pompeii, sometimes with grey school underwear showing.

This is the thing: even when you’re world class, there are other greatnesses you can’t quite reach. The tenor from Covent Garden was delightfully intimate and I was thrilled to be reunited with Stephan Jäger, the international organist and DJ, not seen for nearly two years. He says he’s got a new piece for me. He’s going to take the Wigmore Hall and give it – but there’s no organ there. It’ll have to be the Albert Hall. At airports, between organ perfs, he enlivens the time by seeing how much value he can add to his face from the tester tubes and pots at the cosmetics counter. Highest score was 200 euros from an 800 euro sample moisturiser.

Stephan boarded with his face boosted in value by 200 euros.

I walked Finn Magnus, the hot boy doc, to his bus stop. He said he’d been to a perf (somehow a porn star came into it) of a work by one of the  Shoreditch House guests, a person of great notoriety in our nation not uninvolved with American trash TV. He’d been with Lord Arrowby.

Well, Lord Arrowby, as you know he’s my part-time love interest: at Reggie’s party he made a concession. I’ll have to tell you about it. Rather alarming. But what I’m thinking, among other things, is how would it be if Lord Arrowby were brought to the belief that he could save me? That somehow I needing rescuing?

He’d launch the life-boats, he really would.

Saturday 14th January 2012

Arjan Bose, the pseudo kitchen: he had to board at once for India last night because his father was struck by cerebral haemorrhage on Thursday and has been operated on.

In the evening, it was announced from Fordingbridge that June Cut-Deeping, last heard of after Christmas refusing to mix with ‘old trouts not may tape’ on the ward, has made her final departure at 93. She was in the ATS with Anthony Mottram’s mother and they’d been bickering away ever since, for 70 years at least.  Their husbands were long gone.

Of infinite grandeur and splendid impossibility, I just never thought that June Cut-Deeping would agree to go.

Sunday 8th January 2012

I haven’t forgotten about Lord Arrowby – I know you’re aching to know what progress was made with my fatal or not so fatal part-time love interest.

Just now, it’s all passion spent. I’m wiped out by the whole thing. Lord A in person has removed to India.

But he’ll be back.

Last night, Laura Malcolm ‘curated’ (the Photo Multi’s term) a 70s Retro dinner in her massive Bruce MacBain designed glass extension. She had a sudden wen for prawn cocktail,  baked gammon with pineapple ring, duchesse potatoes, peas and red cabbage, followed by Baked Alaska. Her frock was what the Gay Mother would call a ‘certain shade’ of turquoise, a kaftanesque creation reduced at Monsoon to £19.50 (‘I can’t think why,’ Laura said). Her husband, Matt Driver, who earns more than loathed Robin Smallmeal, head of landfill in this country or whatever, ( Matt manoeuvres the Nation’s shopping habits while it’s not looking)  had been to a vintage clothes shop and bought a Zara slim-fit 70s style shirt (so not a real vintage at all).

We drank Blue Nun and Black Tower, until the Multis arrived and we switched to Bollinger. I sat next to a hedge-fund manager (the looks and money at the dinner, and the second homes: but Laura won’t have any arse with the money, so that never got through the door). I said, ‘Have you got £50 million for my mine?’ You may not remember about my mine, but it needs 50 million – just so as you’re aware.  He seemed to know astonishingly little about the Baby Jesus but that was because he spent £100,000 on his son’s Bar Mitzvah at the Natural History Museum.

Laura Malcolm's Retro 70s Main Meal: Duchesse Potatoes Piped, Frozen Peas, Pineapple Ring

Friday 6^th January 2012

Reggie Cresswell, the Ghanaian ceramicist who triumphed in the summer with an astonishing multi-room ceramic the like of which the world has never seen before… Meissen or Chelsea re-made for the modern age. He’s on the world stage, was wearing for his party private gilded Levis, one of only five pairs conferred by the company, yet is an artist with a monastic streak. His home is hill-top high and from it he sees far, all over London in fact. It was re-modelled and doubled in size by Bruce MacBain four years ago to give vast sweeping spaces in which are placed a few exceptional antiques and rather more paintings.

To be a true artist and Poor Little Rich Gay is to live more on a knife-edge than an ordinary Poor Little Rich Gay who is only the artist of his or her own life. Reggie has quite a lot of neck pain, for a start.

I saw so little of him at the party. He was always processing and pouring from a champagne bottle or in the kitchen with Bruno-France Bruno, the great mystery PLRG who always seems to manage a loan of Picassos for the bedroom. Wonderful food and drink!

Lord Arrowby, that sensational governmental formidability, was there, my part-time love interest in the slinkiest silver! Oh! there were developments. And Claude Noel, who was a very early mobile-phone user before moving to Hollywood and the specialist vintage Cadillac market. He was hot in white nylon combats with deliciously smooth small of back showing. I was reunited with Harry Rollo, the impresario and performance artist, who’s been away for months, staging La Bohème upside down with an actual rock orchestra, that’s an orchestra made of rock, with some glass for relief. In New York, the private apartment he stayed in had a concert hall with seating for 100. Harry said we were in the presence of Madonna’s brother’s former boyfriend. Madonna is an awful bore, apparently. But they were all there at that millennium eve party in Miami, with Versace and Rupert Everett.

Rufus Pitman had ruthlessly left Raj Zoroaster home alone on New Year’s Eve with a hurty knee. I do love love shown through conflict. So much better than kissy kissy lovey lovey yuck. Rufus has always been a huge encourager of Lord Arrowby and I entwining. He once spoke quite firmly to Lord A about it. I think it will have to be strictly above the waist though. Now he is writing a book about handwriting and I told him how, as an infant PLRG, I would learn italic because the adults were so against it. Such shopping opps, for nibs in different sizes and inks. He’s going to interview me properly.

Oh look, no space left for Lord Arrowby, that wounded loveliness! He did quite run out the door, but there’s more than meets the eye. He’ll have to have a whole entry to himself.

I do have one thought, though, not necessarily adjacent: we’re always told that love’s the great driver, what everybody craves. But some absolutely go round the long way to avoid it.

Thank you, Reggie, for throwing open your wonderful home on New Year’s Eve.

Tuesday 3rd January 2012

Once again we wave goodbye to Christmas and I still haven’t told you about Reggie Cresswell’s New Year Party, where that world ceramicist became, for me at least, an ogee shape moving across a vast expanse of champagne carpet with a champagne bottle at the shoulder.

The work of giving a party! Even for a figure internationally known.

Lord Arrowby was there, my fatal love-interest – oh!  Never more ravishing nor impossible.

There’s more to tell.

But, moving back , my Christmas joy was woven with death, as I’ve mentioned. Which threw light on which, I wonder?  Cousin Smurry accidentally reinvented Christmas dinner. For two years now we’ve had no bird and trimmings because of her new dog, which is out of control and will remain so. This year she produced Ottolenghi, the chicken with sumac, z’atar and lemon. Do you know, I was convinced. I’ve been deeply against the no bird; in fact I was quite willing to explode the family on account of it. Poor Little Rich Gays spend every day of the rest of the year remaking, reinventing, making it new, making it new. A ruthlessly traditional Christmas dinner is all we have to cling on to.

Cousin Smurry took even that away. But now she’s given something back, almost another nativity. Ottolenghi may have been looking tired on every other day, but on Christmas Day it shone like the star in the East which guided the Wise Men.

Oh I was thrilled.

As last year, the Gay Mother and I visited Mrs Dinner (or ‘Dinner’ as she is feudally known), our old retainer,  in her nursing home. She bucketed into the day room in her wheelchair, blazing with jewels and coiffure, shrieking with delight to see us, her bandaged legs explained as a fall from her bike (not in fact ridden for 25 years, but no matter), hoping soon to be released while keen to emphasise how well she is looked after. It is hard to put your finger on what exactly is wrong. She is not confused but deluded and the delusions keep on changing. Occasionally they appear to coincide with reality or do they? In any case, conversation peters out rather in some kind of acknowledgement, perhaps on both sides, that the entire visit might either be forgotten immediately or redescribed to others in terms quite other.

Not so June Cut-Deeping, best friend for 70 years of Anthony Mottram’s mother, who at 93 is bodily shrinking in a hospital at Fordingbridge. I gained in my official car on the way back from the Gay Mother’s.

(Mottram has condescended to text but will not yet speak after our estrangement of two years: we had an enjoyable exchange: ME: ‘You’ve not had a good year, I see: they’ve got you out in Libya and Tunisia.’ HIM: ‘You’re running out of friends in Syria.’ ME: ‘I saw you being stretchered into that court room in Egypt with a fab raven rinse.’ HIM: ‘You’re still raving in Tehran.’

This is more like it.

June Cut-Deeping was often on the Royal Yacht in Malta days; in fact Blaster stepped on Princess Elizabeth’s dress, the fool. Once I drove her from Wiltshire to the Lake District: ‘This isn’t at all the route we take for Stranraer,’ she declared. ‘We always take A roads for Stranraer.’  ‘In the car for Stranraer, there’s always air conditioning. Does this car have air-conditioning?’

Well, she is to remain one-up to the end, that’s clear, even on death itself. ‘I blame Dr Livesey,’ she announced. ‘I was perfectly all right before I went anywhere near him.’  Dr Livesey refused the heart valve operation before Christmas on account of her poor state. ‘He should have chanced it.’ Now she won’t mix in the ward: ‘They’re not may tape,’ she boomed to general hearing. ‘They’re a lot of old trouts.’