Wednesday 16^th November 2011

How to explain, how to explain my vision of Love? Leonardo was the root of it, I’m sure.

So perhaps first of all, to delay, let me tell you about Dinner by Heston Blumenthal. That’s the name of the restaurant, lodged within the so-called Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Knightsbridge, directly opposite H Nicks.

You know those 5 star hotels, seething with suspect money and rich tourists in nothing clothes, no whiff of normality. We were in the private room, which is library red with massive door knocker-type wall lights, gazing through glass panels at a lot of sports jackets. Only on the way out were two dollies, perhaps Russian, tottering into the bar in dolly clothes and 8 inch heels.

There were five courses, all British, from different historical periods: the second was a mandarin with leaves on a board, only it was paté and the ‘peel’ was an orange jelly of some kind. In the 16^th century such food illusions were popular. The Tipsy Pudding was from the 19^th century and had been re-modelled by Heston with brioche. Someone has to sit up all night and monitor its oven progress every three minutes, then judge the insertion of alcohol. Many confections fail, collapsing under the strain of the drink.

The result was a fairly uneventful bread/cake with the power to knock you across the room from the added spirit.

I love Heston; he’s absolutely off his head.

The Multis arranged this now engraved evening. How shall we ever forget it? The wines they ordered were some of the greatest known. I’m sorry to say it was a subscription dinner. I was let off since it was given for my birthday six weeks ago but £2600 was total. I hear that the priceless Multis underwrote and bailed out to a considerable extent. A large JCB, its scooper full of cash, was seen manoeuvring into the hotel at the end.

O! my vision of Love – may it come into words when called!

Meat Fruit Illusion at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, Tuesday 8th November 2011

Door-Knocker Type Wall Light in Private Room at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, Knightsbridge, London

Non-Private Room Diners at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, Seen Through Glass from the Private Room

Dinner by Heston Blumenthal: Menu Part 1

Dinner by Heston Blumenthal: Menu Part 2

Dinner by Heston Blumenthal: Menu Part 3

Monday 14th November 2011

I know…such riches promised…my vision of what love is… in addition Dinner at Heston to be evoked…

But the Gay Mother, 87, is having her bathroom done up. ‘White tiles,’ she says, for the bath surround. ‘What kind of white tiles?’ I inquire. ‘Oblong? Square? Thin? Fat? Smooth or Provencal finish? Beveled? What colour grout? What house for the tiles? Bruce MacBain favours Johnson and Johnson. You’ll be three weeks choosing at least. ‘ ‘Oh, I’m not interested in any of that.’ What about the tiling module? Where will the short ends go? Grid or ‘brick’ lay-out?  You need Bruce MacBain (he’s my private architect)….I’m sure he could helicopter down…’

A bit of a pause at the Gay Mother’s end of the telephone: ‘I don’t think I’ll be making a scene about some tiles.’

Agony!

Saturday 12th November 2011

Such sudden richness! On Tuesday we took Dinner at Heston, £2600 the total.

You can’t imagine. I intend to evoke.

Then I’ve had visions after Leonardo: I’ve seen what love is. Will I be able to assemble in words?

Today at a Craft Fayre in a Baptist Church in Bath, passing through a doorway, without warning, just like that, suddenly I lifted by six inches at least, high and proud, filled with glory, riveted by life, sweeping all before.

On Thursday, with Joshua Baring, I took a play at the Hampstead Theatre: The Last of the Duchess. Angela Thorne appeared as Lady Diana Moseley in a simple jersey and skirt day outfit and vast diamond earrings.

But just look…. just look… who stood before two works by Beatrice Cantor, so bought and loved by the Multis, at Margate yesterday.

They were all there: Elsa Hodgeman, too, the Gertrude Stein de nos jours. They all lunched afterwards: poached Kent pear, honeycomb and ice-cream. Tracey Emin sat at the D of E’s table.

Notice also that Majesty (yes! it’s her) is taking Summer shades into Winter.

Look Who Stood Before Two Works by Beatrice Cantor at Margate

Tuesday 8th November 2011

Complete outfit crisis: leaving for Heston Dinner or Heston Diner in 40 mins. Not sure whether to go to Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Knightsbridge or Heston Service Station. The Photo Multi refuses information.

Want to have a summer note, something white or cream.

Otherwise I have direction: this winter I’m going to be wearing my sky-blue jeans by Lindberg right through the winter. Summer colours are going into winter this year. I might even try my Marc Jacobs cream jeans in snow, should there be snow.

Or ice.

On Saturday I’m going to rave into Gap in Bath, where, sources at Palm Springs tell me, many bright coloured jeans and slacks are to be had of superb standard.

I’ve bought a brown Harris Tweed jackette from Topman; it’ll go so well with the sky-blue. And with the other blazing leg-wear I’m going to get at Bath on Saturday.

Concerning foundation garments, I’ve acquired slate jeans by Lindberg, one navy-blue shirt in stretch fabric and one office-type stripy business shirt from the Prada factory shop, Montevarchi.

By foundation I mean straightforward items that hold up the wardrobe.

In outer garments (so important: the biggest challenge of winter is judgement by outer garments: reflect – where will you be seen by the greatest number of people? On the street, in the mart, strutting in the country, in your outer garments) I’ve added a car coat by Guaglianone with zip interest ( a rare house who engineer clothes rather than sew them: I got it at the Designer Warehouse Sale, Thane Villas, London N1 for £140)

Sky-blue summer jeans by Lindberg About to be Taken into Winter, Cunningly Teamed with New Brown Harris Tweed Jackette from Topman in Heritage Cut

Car-Coat by Guaglianone with Zip-Interest: £140 from Designer Warehouse Sale: Down from £700. I'LL WEAR IT IN VENICE ON DECEMBER 2ND !!!

Foundation Garment: Slate Jeans by Lindberg: Get Them at H Nicks

Tuesday 8th November 2011

Here are the graphs for yesterday’s post. In addition to above, Windows decided to import all 936 graphs from my camera, even though already imported; no way of stopping it and selecting 2 new graphs required.  Had to delete all graphs from camera and re-take these shots below.

Fashion tips to come: tweeds and summer colours for Winter/Autumn. I’ve no time to get to Gap to look at new skinny jeans or cotton slacks in bright colours. Have you observed? They are THE fashion note this Autumn in menswear.

You’ll have seen them everywhere. Perhaps I’ll penetrate a branch in Bath at the weekend.

By the way, trousering in dog-tooth check: dog-tooth check is THE fashion note this Autumn in menswear.

I’ve got a man coming in 10 mins to see about my TV and how it is rayed into the home. I’m hoping to get rid of ghastly tangle of  cables.

Poor Little Rich Gays don’t have wires in the home.

Tonight we take Dinner at Heston or Heston’s Dinner. But the Photo Multi refuses to tell me where it is. ‘Google!’ he says. I’ll try Heston Service Station in the first place. I believe that is the birthplace of Heston Blumenthal.

My Parcel from Majestic Containing Shower Screen Seal: Note Boscoe Holder Hanging Hard By

Unsatisfactory Shower Screen Seal by Majestic to be Replaced

Monday 7th November 2011

This Monday has been identical to last Monday: detail, detail, detail. Up to the bathroom shop: ‘Where’s that replacement plastic seal for my Bruce-McBain-inspired (he’s my private architect) Majestic shower-screen?’ Do you remember? It’s v. badly designed; has a hollow tube that gets moldy; I had to push a Q-tip through with wire to clean. Now it’s started to split after only 18-months. Last Monday thrice I crowed at the bathroom shop. I mean I went there three times: twice to get the size right, a third time to explain that if they ordered it, rather than me doing it directly, the delivery charge of £50 could be circumvented.

Today they had had no word of the plastic seal. I went on to the Post Office to collect a mystery parcel. Can you guess what it was? Long, thin box? Very light? Yes! Majestic have sent direct to me anyway!

Otherwise I’ve decided to have new kitchen sponge scourers and new bathroom cloths and non-scratch bathroom scourers.

But what about Val? I was round there last night to watch Downton. ‘L’Abbaye Downton’ as Val proclaimed. ‘This script is phoned in.’  He has fuzzy black and white TV also with bars across, no remote, no computer, minimal mobile phone, recently acquired further skeletal jewellery after crashing while sauced, his bedlinen has seen better days but he’s being portrayed. A private artist is coming to his flatti; on a paying basis. Val is sitting for his portrait.

Oh Poor Little Rich Gays! What utter greatness!

Money and beauty: last week I was mediating on money and beauty. Do you recall? In Florence the Medicis fuelled Botticelli with banking’s proceeds and the art grew more worldly until Savonarola bitched up and started bonfires in the Piazza Signoria. Those protesters at St Paul’s are the modern equivalent.

What of it? I’ve been wondering. I suppose it’s a cycle. Money builds up and bursts, there’s a backlash, much rending and burning; then it starts all over again. Not much to be done.

Money does give beauty though. Savonarola?

Come back tomorrow: I’ve fashion tips. I’m going to take Summer into Winter. I’ve been consulting with sources at Palm Beach.

Thursday 3rd November 2011

Monday we were at Purbeck Crowhurst’s Hallowe’en Party, the Multis and I. Purbeck Crowhurst is an artist: he likes foxes, hares, owls especially, shy night creatures with mysterious powers. Recently he has hurtled from obscurity and now shows and sells at Trenton’s Gallery but still lives in a period council flat in Islington. The Multis have bought his work and got onto visiting terms.

Absolutely astonishing! The flat is encrusted every square inch with kitsch crystals, creepy dolls, boxes of poodle’s ashes, animal skulls; I’ve never seen an interior so done. There’s wallpaper on the ceilings, collages, ecclesiastical remnants, bead curtains, not  a corner not completely intended.

For the party Purbeck was in a black frock, black wig and 8 inch witch’s heels. Other guests were splattered with blood and carrying their hacked off limbs. A woman’s husband, with black head piece on elaborate ladies’ wig circa 1880, quite insisted that Stonehenge is in France although also in Wiltshire and lamented, possibly, the many-centuries absence of Druids from Europe. I didn’t know there’d been a Druid absence. It was very hard to get his drift. Direct questioning as to meaning only produced further mystery. This husband’s wife was rigged as an amazing dead-ringer for a woman in a portrait by Klimt. The resemblance she neither denied nor acknowledged but made sounds, gestures and facial expressions never before known in any human.

The Blond Multi was deep in discussion with a fellow art-buyer about temporary cash-flow probs. £450,000 for a Chris Ofili hard to lay hands on …

So I was reminded of that exhibition in Florence at the Palazzo Strozzi – Money and Beauty.  Medici money paid for Botticelli and seemed to produce a new kind of  more secular if not pagan art.  Of course the Medicis might have been hugely religious but it’s not surprising they weren’t. They wanted bright colours, flowers, Spring Maidens in see-thru frocks and no Virgin Mary.  So money brings gay, joyous pleasures of this kind. What else does it bring? In the end Botticelli went over to Savonarola, the fearsome fanatical monk who led a Puritan back-lash and burned irreligious works in the Piazza Signoria. That was in the January and he was burnt himself in the May. He didn’t last long.

What are we to make of it all? And what of the connection, today, between money and beauty?  The Multis, personally beautiful of course, were there in that council flat with the other art-buyer, as well as, me, Adrian Edge.

Purbeck Crowhurst Hosts a Hallowe'en Party

Final Resting Place of Purbeck Crowhurst's Poodles: Their Ashes are in Those Boxes

Spare Hand at Purbeck Crowhurst's Hallowe'en Party

A Woman's Husband at Purbeck Crowhurst's Hallowe'en Party

Purbeck Crowhurst: The Dressing Table

Purbeck Crowhurst: Self-Made Fox Lampshade

Purbeck Crowhurst: Owl Painting, Self-Done

Charming Toy Poodle

Tuesday 1st November 2011

So much to tell. But the Gay Mother on the phone. We went to a Hallowe’en Party in a Council premises. The Multis gained with Bollinger.

Perfectly astonishing.

Such themes as well, all weaving in by chance (apparently) with that exhibition I was telling you about in Florence at the Palazzo Strozzi entitled ‘Money and Beauty’. It showed how the patronage of the Medicis produced a great flowering of more sensual, almost pagan art, such as Botticelli’s Primavera but it all ended up with Savonarola, who burned the lot in a fit of Puritan pique but was burned himself almost at once. You might be reminded of the protesters camped outside St Paul’s today.

We’ve been greatly concerned with money and its justification, as you know.

But no time now. Just a few pictures to be going on with..

Purbeck Crowhurst Hosting His Hallowe'en Party

Purbeck Crowhurst: Incidental Lamp or Ornament in his Home as Seen by Me, Adrian Edge, at Hallowe'en

A Typical Guest at Purbeck Crowhurst's Hallowe'en Party: This Person is a Woman's Husband

Sunday 30th October 2011

Back in London from Florence on Monday I’ve done nothing but shop and book. My jeans have been in crisis, I’ve taken against my winter coat, I’ve been wondering about taking summer colours into winter. So much to tell and so much happiness too.

On Friday I went last minute to shimmering winter Glyndebourne. Never even knew there was winter Glyndebourne. It had that famous aria in it, which I sang all the way home in my Official Car with Xenon driving lights.

It was the Multis’ inspiration which gave winter Glyndebourne, those outstanding property and company owning multi-millionaires.

I promised to share my Florence apartemento. Perhaps you’d think of taking a flatti for your City-Break as an alternative to an hotel; certainly cheaper. The Gay Mother and I had this one in the centre of Florence: one week, £1500.Vast, two bedrooms and two bathrooms: two couple could be there. On gaining we were dismayed by the smell, poor tiling modules and slight delap in the bathrooms. The Gay Mother found the sofa be-crumbed. After foot-stamping and vigorous shaking out of fabrics over Gucci shoppers below, much improvement, in the end the smell delicious, grew v. fond of the apartemento.

In other news and then we must say a sad goodbye to Florence at least until next summer (but Venice looms – oh yes! ) – Poor Little Rich Gays, especially those who took a three-layer cake-stand tea at winter Glyndebourne on Friday, will be bucked up to find that Renaissance sculptors (i.e. Donatello) included a bulging stomach in their vision of the ideal human form.

Also, you won’t have heard of an Italian artist from the 13th century called Cimabue, who has had the most rotten post-death luck. Yet more of his work was destructed in the Assisi earthquake a few years ago. In the 1966 Florence flood I had always understood that a crucifix of his, kept at Santa Croce, had been lost completely. The Gay Mother and I inspected an exhibition of flood photos which seemed to suggest that no, it was back. We asked the attendants and yes! in the museum, they said, it is to be found.

And so it was.

It would have been better had it not been bashed and lashed by oil and mud in 1966; but there it is, something remains.

Poor Little Rich Gays sense the looming black jaws of death. It is part of their greatness.

Cimabue Crucifix Not Destructed After All in Florence Floods 1966: Santa Croce, Florence

Donatello's David: Stomach Not Flat: Encouraging

Cosimo de Medici: Forerunner of the Multis, Those Fabulous Multi-Millionaire PLRGs

Florence Apartemento: Via della Vigna Nuova: This is the Sofa We Had to Get Vac-ed and Sprayed

My Bedroom in the Apartemento: Via della Vigna Nuova, Florence

Tiling Module Gone Badly Wrong: Also Old: Shower in Apartemento Via della Vigna Nuova, Florence

Stain on Bathroom Floor: Apartemento Via della Vigna Nuova, Florence

Thursday 27th October 2011

Big surprise! Zegna leads the way. Ermenegildo Zegna. What kind of a name is that?

Not a house I usually touch. Boring. Middle-aged.

But just look at this! See graph below. Tiny boiled wool jackette and dog-toothed check trousers.

Yes, dog-toothed check is looking  new in trousering this Autumn.

That’s it!

Otherwise it’s tiny jackettes and separates as before.

The Gay Mother was sniffy. Of that Zegna look, seen in Via Tornabuoni, Florence, she said: ‘You can’t wear that. You’re too big.’  ‘But I’ve been championing the tiny jackette for the last two seasons,’ I screeched. ‘I wear it superbly. Anyway I don’t care. It’s new. ‘ ‘You’ve got to be able to move in the jacket,’ she said. ‘No you haven’t. Jackets are tiny at the moment. You can’t move. It’s too bad. It’s what the houses are showing.’ ‘What a way of carrying on,’ the Gay Mother said.

For Ladies, it’s white. The houses are being controversial to say the least for how is a lady to manage a white coat in the Euro crisis?The Dry Cleaning.

She just will, I suppose. There’s no escape. It’s white dresses as well, the Burberry offering in a death-white, rather menacing: perhaps a killer nurse or extra-terrestrial personage.

Ermenegildo Zegna: Surprise Trend-Setter: Tiny Jackette, DOG-TOOTH CHECK TROUSERS

Ermenegildo Zegna: THE sillouette with DOG-TOOTH CHECK element for This Autumn

Armani, Via Tornabuoni, Florence: Dog-tooth check is Looking New This Autumn

Ladies' White Dress: Burberry: Via Tornabuoni, Florence: Slightly Medical Feeling or Could be Worn by An Alien

Prada: Ladies' White Coat: Val Doonican Effect: It's Not a Separate Dress Underneath, But Sown In, Part of the Coat

Ladies' White Coat: Burberry: Via Tornabuoni, Florence