WHAT CAN POOR LITTLE RICH GAYS DO?

I can hardly breathe. Not the whole of Tuscany can soothe. Plunging markets and now the Visigoths have descended.

Only last week,  double dining in London,  seems another age.

Two types of savagery at once have escaped their kennels (they were there all the time, waiting) and now pad through the land, jaws loose and swinging. The market brutes senselessly selling, their terror of no recovery now ensuring no recovery and the rioters and looters, wracked by poverty apparently, the same.

Poor Little Rich Gays think only of themselves: or this one does at least. My home burnt to a crisp, my official Car a blackened hulk. But we’ve played our part; we’ve made the gated community: within was moisturiser at £60 a pot minimum, Villa with swimming pool  (I’m in one now, typing on a floating piece), better swimming trunks, 4-star hotels (but Harry Rollo said: 4-stars hell, 5 heaven) driver at the door, the Prada bags, even if at 50% discount, the fayne waynes and speciality perfumes – even Hermes, as a fume, just a wheeny bit high street.

What will we do now?

There I feel better. I’m in an apartemento in Tuscany with pool. There are insect screens. But I’ve killed a hornet. Yesterday it was sinking, filthy hot with a feverish non-storm overhead. Today bliss: fresh and clear. You can see San Gimignano from here. I’ve got Arjan Bose, the exquisite Indian doctor, with. He’s really Robert Nevil’s treasure but I’m borrowing him for a week. It’s separate bedrooms, you understand, also with RN, although I’m not sure the owner of the apartemento, who is in her own apartemento downstairs, has grasped that. We’ve tried hard to stamp in the different bedrooms at bedtime so she’ll hear.

Arjan is actually 35 and a doctor with his own patients but he’s got perfect pseudo-infant ways. Poor Little Rich Gays like to have someone to look after, you see. Come back later for further explanation and developments. The Kitchen phenomenon (see glossary) comes into it, of course.

I’m thinking, after all that’s happened, of moving into the kitchen department myself, although, now, there’s the question of how to afford… So a kitchen who earns is ideal.

But back to Italy: by the way, the infinite superiority of Tuscany over Umbria, where we were last year. The Photo Multi made his views clear after a week at that Umbrian villa provided by Prince Dmitri and myself. He’s absolutely right of course. Umbria won’t do at all, although we did go there, market selling brutes and rioters and looters please believe it, to save money, we did really.

Umbria’s very lovely but Tuscany’s lovelier. Umbria’s just a bit too natural and there are more factories on which we depend for investment income and prosperity generally so we can afford not to be near factories. Tuscany’s probably the greatest man-and-woman-made landscape in the world, with just the right balance of vast panoramas provided, as you might say, by basic nature. But even these man and woman have dressed.

Yesterday Arjan and I took a Chiantishire drive which acquired, for me, as aspect of a trip down memory lane to 1976 when I first took Tuscany with Anthony Mottram, now estranged, but for 40 years the main home for me on this earth.

Now I recall, in a dream last night, that on Facebook was a message: ‘Anthony Mottram has chosen you as a Loved One’.

I’ve discovered Certaldo Alta: completely new 15^th century hill-top town, new to me at least, astonishingly austere, all done in tones of terracotta. I saw a bride there – beyond belief.

Just one thing though: on the way over here on Saturday from Florence airport I got lost and the Fiat 500 hire-car had a life of its own, switched off its air-con, sometimes wouldn’t start or move for no reason. I thought I might hurtle into a ditch and tumble down and down through the olive groves: not exactly a craving for the grave but that it didn’t really matter. Somehow it was just a little bit more effort to stay on the road but there wasn’t much in it, consequences of veering off just a vague turmoil.

Just a wheeny bit odd but I’m all right now.

The Greatest Landscape in the World Known and Re-Made Through Art

Pool and View at my Apartemento

View of San Giminiwhinny from my Apartemento

Certaldo Alta: Superbly Austere and Tourist-Free

The Groom was Stained by The Wall: They were Being Styled by Photographer Just Visible

La Braciana: the Multis' Tuscan Villa of Two Years Ago Seen Yesterday: We are Now Barred

Plastic Duck in Apartemento Pool Matching Outsize One Given to Arjan Bose by Prince Dmitri Hersov: But Arjan Does Not Take a Pool So Cannot Play with Duck

Pop-Up Restaurant in Certaldo Alta, Funded by Democratic Party, Where We Dined Excellently Last Night: 54 euros for four Including Wayne

Friday 5^th August 2011

Thank the Lord the markets have closed for the weekend! Wracking strain. Mercifully I bailed out of banks on Tuesday: massive losses, netted about £2.30. Going into mines and technology instead.

Pre-boarding tension as well: I board for Tuscany tomorrow. Can’t wait to escape. From there the collapse of the world economy will be a comforting distant murmur.

Now, my new style of dinner. Very simple. Get the guests to do the cooking. If you have a private architect, as I do, use him or her. On Tuesday I launched into three never-before-done Ottolenghi recipes plus a true Melba: I had world-architect, Virgil Grayson (not to be confused with my private architect, Bruce MacBain, who dominates London) slicing peaches. His partner, Cedric Partridge, said that Dame Nellie Melba didn’t actually like Melba toast. He is of a museum and is often accompanied on aircraft by a small Vermeer or Rembrandt.

I could explain why but it would spoil the shape of the sentence.

The True Melba, by the way, is real peaches, with top-drawer vanilla ice-cream and raspberry sauce made by pressing raspberries through a sieve and adding icing sugar.

Bruce MacBain helped me with the chick-pea flour pancakes, mounted with tomatoes and onions, although I managed the green gazpacho (about 18 ingredients, but only to be whizzed) and the herb omelettes filled with potato and sorrel by myself (7 to be made one by one).

But I couldn’t run to the pancakes. Why not try this yourself? Put the guests to work. It’s ideal for August because it re-creates, in London, the joint-venture cooking of the villa holiday, in this case without the near blows over risotto method that erupt without fail whenever Poor Little Rich Gays gain  Tuscany.

I’m not sure you could get away with it in any other month though.

Otherwise, I said to Bruno-France Bruno, the great mystery Poor Little Rich Gay, now with an apartment at Deauville and a house at St Germain en Laye, ‘Do you know any society in Tuscany?’ ‘Well, there’s a Contessa who deals in black diamonds.’

I wonder if we will achieve her, next week in Tuscany.

Harry Rollo, the impresario and performance artist, who flooded the Hollywood bowl and had the audience in diving suits, is invited to join a private yacht next week on a non-paying basis. It will cruise off the California coast. Pre-boarding instructions have been issued in writing: no long trousers, but a windcheater essential. Oil-based lotions not allowed, nor clothes with studs; shoes are not worn, no metal belt-buckles, all because of the teak. ‘Minimizing salt water aboard helps aesthetics,’ the guidance explains helpfully. Gentlemen are requested to wear shirts when sitting on the interior fittings. Hooks on the doors are for towels only, not hanging garment bags – the teak again.

I couldn’t agree more. What’s an interior for if not to be ruthlessly preserved until such time as you get bored of it and can throw it away – as the Limpney/Smallmeals did at Massivebury. Although not everyone would actually have an entire home with 9 bedrooms bollocked to pulp then flung into a pit.

When I was on board a gullet in Turkey with Laura Malcolm and Frankie-Doreen May, their husbands and children, the main challenge was the pump lavs.

Reggie Cresswell also dined, glowing from the triumph of his new 240 room ceramic. Everyone is agreed that nothing like it has been done in ceramic before. The figures disappear, then reappear in different guises. Bruno-France Bruno confided that Guinevere Pelham recently tripped at her own dinner and hurled an entire salmon at Sir Andrew Motion.

Thursday 4^th August 2011

What can we do? I can hardly breathe.

You remember that Esmé Manning was prostrate (or is it prostate?) with money worries last week in Normandy. It did turn out that she raised £1500 in the auction room (good silver tea service), the bank loan was granted, her home is worth £1.2 (as the Multis would say), with rental possibilities (the Multis’ absolute favourite of the investment options) and she’s got a good peni (or pension).

But, as Laura Malcolm said, We could all go at any moment. Matt Driver’s massive efficacy could suddenly shrivel away, property could crash, investments evap.

What are we to do? I’m worried sick.  Southern Europe’s a massive debt suction-pump; and now America’s finished. It’s Tobago October 2008 all over again: in and out that little villa drawing room, telly on non-stop as those rows and rows of numbers turned red and hurtled backwards.

I don’t know that I can go through it all again.

On the other hand, Poor Little Rich Gays will make the most fuss before phoenix-ing forth more splendidly than anyone else.

Our outing to Deauville was a step in the right direction. One week later, it takes clear shape as a luxe-rejection gesture. The plate glass at Ralph Lauren and Hermès could be heard creaking then quietly shattering as we retreated. Esmé had said: ‘Plaid crap.’ Both of them just wailed, wordless at the misery of the Hermès scarves.  Instead they found an unexpected source, just there in the middle of the beach, completely unsupervised, nobody trying to charge, of top quality grey mud  and took £400 foot treatments for free. All as nature intended.

And what about Flint Cantor? You must have heard of him. His whole life is an art installation, massively publicised. He once opened the National Gallery in a dry cleaners, then he sold his life to start again.

He’s had his own self-induced credit crunch and Euro debt crisis. Now he’s living in an under-the-arches lock-up in Shoreditch, two narrow prongs of a magnet with the sleeping quarters in the connecting part. It might be nippy in the winter, but on a balmy night, with 40 dinner guests cascading into the hot, Carmen-style courtyard, exotic and luxurious. Massive national names were present: Arne Beringer, sculptor and painter, Elsa Hodgeman, the Gertrude Stein de nos jours (guess who was at the French chateau where she stayed last week? DAVID MILLIBAND. Hot in trunks.) Then there was the wild exaggeration of pin-stripe and cufflink that is the Multis and Prince Dmitri Hersov mixed in with the artists who mostly have nothing. But how the money-side diarised! So many art openings came to light for September.

What a scene! The whole dinner was an art work with a theme of childhood circling round love-bitten Flint as a wilfully created concept version of Don Juan. All the guests were talking about his ‘adventures’ after meeting themselves as illustrations on the plates (glazed too, not just slapped on) and on the table cloths. The walls were thick with Flint’s fierce, violently coloured, child-friendly paintings as well as those of a friend of his. For back-up were what you might call temporary artworks –  rough card-board wendy houses, engagingly scrawled over and daubed and across the back wall a huge, riotious slab of painted cardboard.

It really was festive, with an undercurrent.

The food was the only normal aspect: lavish mixed meat starter (I’ve never seen Parma so heaped) and superb beef taxi-ed round from Flint’s sister (Beatrice Cantor’s) Aga. Lemon, though, was squeezed on with alarming freedom by the six-year-old waitresses (the artist’s own off-spring and relations) in excellent fitted uniforms.

We expected an outrage or to be hacked into at any moment by the News of the World. But only a table leaf collapsed. After dinner the child waitresses began urgently to produce artworks of their own and to sell them at prices varying from 2p to £1.50.

I ripped off the artist’s daughter by buying a double-sided work for £1. It really should have been £2.

Deauville: Luxe Resort: Bruno-France Bruno Likely to Undertake a Season Here

Laura Malcolm and Esme Manning: after Natural Mud Treatment

'Plaid Crap': Esme Manning at Deauville

Hermes Horror at Deauville

Flint Cantor's Art Dinner: Table-Styling

The Art, Also by A Friend, at Flint Cantor's Art Dinner

Flint Cantor: Love Bite Installation

For Sale: Art by Younger Diners at Flint Cantor's Art Dinner

Table Illustration at Flint Cantor's Art Dinner

Tuesday 2^nd August 2011

As it happens I’m back from Normandy: Flint Cantor’s Shoreditch art launch dinner for 40 was last night: come back tomorrow to hear about the mysterious love-bite. Was there an outrage? Why were the waitresses six-years-old?  Was the event hacked by the News of the World? If not, why not? Huge names were there. No-one gets more publicity than Flint.

Back to Normandy where Laura Malcolm has made Poor Little Rich Gay food anew for the summer. Ottolenghi –   you won’t believe this! In fact I can’t bear to write it. So very quietly, not to be cruel… but there’s no avoiding it. This summer’s signature Poor Little Rich Gay dish is… you may recall last year, it was, en primeur, fennel shivered over the lowest flame for hours then mounted onto to sourdough crostini, closely followed by Ottolenghi’s mackerel with celery, green olive and raisin salsa with honey, quite simply the most bizarre dish ever presented to and by a Poor Little Rich Gay. Well now, Laura Malcolm offers, via Simon Hopkinson, from the Hole in the Wall Restaurant in Bath circa 1973, salmon en croute with stem ginger and sultanas and a monstrous herb butter sauce.

Yes, it’s true! We’ve kicked out Ottolenghi and gone retro. 1973 in the new new. We had this in Normandy last Thursday. On Wednesday it was Jane Grigson’s pork with plums.

So there.

Who would have thought one Norman  roasting tin containing a pastry parcel could have such a world-shattering impact!

Now, I was going to tell you about Ivy Driver, Laura’s daughter, who finished her GCSEs and at once launched into a self-arranged ‘Come Lunch with Me’. Her menu: Nigella’s moonblush tomato, mint and goat cheese salad, chicken and mushroom pie, and the 14-part orange cake pudding with pomegranate ice-cream, caramel oranges, orange caramel shards, pomegranate jus that was shown on Masterchef back in the winter and re-created by Laura herself at her February dinner.

Ivy was joint winner: the other contestants were all girls with one boy, who did tempura, never having cooked before in his life. He has trouble remembering the names of the maid/housekeepers at his Goldman Sachs funded home, so refers to them collectively as ‘the Marias’.

Greatness beckons for these young people, who can doubt.

Now there’s no time to tell you about our trip to Deauville and how Esmé’s economy upswung. I’ve got a final symphony of Ottolenghi vegetarian to prepare for 7 dining this evening.

Pray there’s no explosion at my Official home or world talent will be wiped out.

Salmon en croute from the Hole in the Wall Restaurant, Bath: This Summer's Poor Little Rich Gay Signature Dish

Its Monstrous Butter and Herb Sauce: Attractive Graph: 'Just a Scrape Left, Mr 'udson.'

Kelm Driver Self-Styles his Fromage Frais Dessert in Normandy

Saturday 30^th July 2011

As every summer, I’m drenched in the deep rural simplicity at Matt Driver and Laura Malcolm’s Norman second home. Otherwise they are palatial and Bruce-MacBain-extended in Fulham/Chelsea borders.

Here Laura is inclined to wear an ancient frock which gives an air of declining mental health. The batterie de cuisine is an old camping set from her father’s caravan (Cornwall: the 70s). Yesterday we were hours in the hot sun, with the divine daughter (brains and looks), Ivy Driver, gathering plums from under their tree, then stoning outdoors at the table (as in Anna Karenina) before bearing our triumphant labours indoors to be boiled for jam. Meanwhile Papa Driver, whose salary exceeds loathed Robin Smallmeal’s, head of landfill in this country or whatever, in pyjamas from BA First Class, was upstairs creating a false wall from plasterboard in a bedroom, then, accompanied by his son, Kelm, in complete harmony as to choice of accompanying music (no generation gap now) applying Cats’ Paw by Farrow and Ball.

I’ve had a word with Kelm. He’s at Art School, you know. He knows someone called Joplin who might be suitable.

Now Matt is laying a brick path in the garden. He’s got to get it level. ‘It doesn’t really matter,’ he says, ‘but one gets obsessed.’ Yesterday I met him on the stairs bearing the local paper. ‘I’m going to study the property pages,’ he said doggedly. This demesne is an excellent pastoral fastness; roses, fruit trees, a huge poplar planted years ago by an unknown former owner for his unknown eldest son, no other houses visible, even from the roof. Laura hurling debris from the refurbishment out of an upper window and the lawn otherwise strewn with paint rags cannot diminish its glory.

‘They’ll be building houses all around soon,’ Matt says. There’s some truth. Horrors have sprung up quite near. Hence the need to see if a larger manoir with 100 acres is for sale.

But meanwhile this Norman retreat is to be aggrandised. They’re knocking through to the abutting barn. There’s to be a grand salon and a 4^th toilet. Matt says status is now measured by number of toilets owned. He’s got 8.

Poor Esmé Manning had to lie in a darkened one day. Such money worries. But she bucked up in the evening and did all the voices as we viewed How Green was My Valley on DVD in the attic TV/bedroom (net worth £6m approx crammed in, £1.2m being Esmé’s). Her impersonation of sickening kiddie-star, Roddy McDowall, was superb. Kelm said: ‘He looks like a little lesbian.’ The part was to squeak, ‘Yessir’, ‘Yessir’, ‘Yessir’, with the occasional daring variation: ‘Yes indeed sir.’ He and his mother fell into an icy brook and the doctor said their legs had been frozen to the bone. Two years in bed seemed to thaw them out nicely but Esmé was outraged at the mother’s earlier recovery: ‘Why’s she got her lallies back before the boy and no weight loss?’ Last night our selection was Gentleman’s Agreement with Gregory Peck. The love interest appeared in a gorgeous gauzy evening get-up. ‘She’s fallen into a net-curtain factory,’ Esmé said.

Kelm is still doing his rendition of when Roddy McDowall got butch and had a boxing match.

Aunt Lavinia’s sister, Joan Burnish-Saner, was great friends with Roddy McDowall in Los Angeles. That was when he was grown up and an old queen.

Esmé could easily take over from Maureen Lipman or Miriam Margolyes if she put her mind to it.

Well, do come back later to hear about our trip to Deauville (we thought: just a tiny touch of luxe couldn’t do any harm) and the encounter with volcanic mud, Ivy Driver’s self-created ‘Come Lunch with Me’ competition, her mother’s new direction in the kitchen (Ottolenghi now struggling for a foothold) and how Esmé’s fortunes took a turn for the better.

The Hard Ware Backing Up the Norman Rural Idyll - with Blue Mink Cat

Matt Driver's Self-Lined Wall - with Chanel Bag

Outdoor Jam-Making - So Simple. Note Camping Set Saucepan

Ivy Driver's Blue Mink Cat Lying on My D & G Spongebag and Amongst my Belts

Thursday 28th July 2011

(Could not post yesterday owing to rural lack of WiFi in Normandy: but today have met Maxence qui est un tres jeune entrepreneur with WiFi and no pants apparently)

I don’t often mention my new car. On Tuesday its Xenon driving lights forged through to Normandy. I said to Esmé Manning, the actress, who was with: ‘I’ll see people clocking as we disgorge from this vehicle on the car deck. They’ll be thinking with some loathing: “Serious car, another, better, dream life.” She said: ‘Real class is in the Eurotunnel not on this rotting hulk by P & O.’

Oh terrible false economy to save £90.

We’re seething with events. In Normandy is the summer home of the Straight branch of the Poor Little Rich Gays. How they’re coming on! Ivy Driver, the daughter, is tending strongly to complex dining at only 15. She’s got a gay friend! Matt Driver, the husband, is up a step-ladder despite a salary exceeding Smallmeal’s (head of landfill in this country or whatever). Then there’s Esmé’s crise financial. ‘But you’re in the top 5% I keep telling her.’ ‘Well, I pity the other 95,’ she says. Her eyebrow threading bill is ruinous. She’ll have to go back on the stage. She couldn’t get the vast plastic-slab of a price tag (£1.99) off her Pound Stretcher glasses. It was plainly intended as a punishment for the reduced price.

So much to tell: I’m rather wondering whether Kelm Driver, the son, might be able to help me with my little plans. It’s a question of who he might know at Art School.

But it’ll have to wait because Bruce MacBain’s curtain agony screams to be heard: he’s my private architect. Laura Malcolm’s too and architect to all the Poor Little Rich Gays. Laura is the wife of Matt Driver, who is in global charge of finding out the deep, buried reasons for our product choices,  the aim being to massively up sales in general. Rather not us, others. At work he ponders certain products with such brilliance that he can afford not to buy them himself.

Bruce MacBain has been five years choosing a curtain to cover his disused front door which, after total reconfiguring of his 18^th century terraced home, is now  in the corner of his ‘living area’. He made his home side-loading. You enter through a side wall. Three years ago I ordered him to select an excellent lilac, heather-mixture silk/linen of which he had a sample ( it was client’s revenge). ‘That’s the one. I want it up in three weeks.’ It wasn’t. Some more samples appeared and lay about. Finally, finally, this May it was announced that the curtain was underway. A heavy silk/linen in old gold had been selected at £150 a metre. Tancredo Viamare, Bruce MacBain’s non-resident partner (or byf, as we used to say), spent three hours discussing, with the maker, the size of ring to be inserted into the fabric so the curtain could be threaded into a pole. Do you know that look?

In June the curtain arrived and was installed.

The curtain maker had gained little from the three-hour conference. The rings are the wrong size. Far too big. In the meantime, Bruce has taken against rings altogether. He wants a rare curtain tape, very wide, which gives pleats every 6 inches.

The top will have to be chopped off the curtain. Luckily he’s got some spare fabric to compensate. All the same, the agony.

Bruce MacBain's Curtain: All Wrong

Bruce MacBain's Wrong Rings: In Fact I Recall a Line from Hardy Very Right for PLRGs '...Love/ Wrings with Wrong...' Prob. Misquoted Slightly

Esme Manning's Pound Stretcher Specs with Punititive Irremoveable Label Recalling the Scarlet Letter or the Placard Helen Burns was Forced to Wear in 'Jane Eyre'

Tuesday 25th July 2011

The Gay Mother, from whom I’m back prior to Norman boarding tomorrow, said: ‘The vicar will have to watch his tongue now.’ Some other people at Church yesterday thought the same. He tends to fundamentalism, you see.  People in the Gay Mother’s faith group, where she seeks deliberately to annoy, are reasonable and humane, but at the mention  of Islam a raving hatred like some awful bird claws their faces.

She’s actually read the Koran.

I keep thinking of those Norwayan boy-gods, one of them running the Ralph Lauren shop in Oslo, who came down for Ralph Kitto’s 50th birthday at the Cap last year. I hope they’re all right.