Friday 15th April 2011

So much to tell about the dedicatees’ dinner for Rufus Pitman’s new novel, just out – but it’ll have to wait.

I’ve gained Rome! Nearly broke down to see ‘binario’ written up. Hadn’t expected it. Must be years since I was in an Italian railway station. They’ve been there all these years without me, the ‘binari’.

At Gatwick I bought a very difficult perfume by Chanel. ‘Pour Monsieur Concentrated’. It could be thought cloying and heavy. The Photo Multi was wearing it on Monday. I had to have it. I texted him from the airport shop: ‘You mostly get what you want,’ he replied.

Now I’m in Sonny’s apartment. Marble-lined! Huge and a roof terrace. We’ll be on it when it’s stopped raining. Sonny’s arranging tulips and I’ve hung up my outfits in a vast walk-in frock cupboard.

I’ve come in at the top in Rome after all!

Sonny's Terrace in Rome - I've Come in the Highest Level

Sonny's Top Level Terrace in Rome

Thursday 14^th April 2011

I’m wearing a Kiehl’s Rare Earth Face Masque: the dinner for the dedicatees of Rufus Pitman’s new novel, Bums and Buns at the Seaside, is at 8.30. I’m missing the beforehand appearance of Rufus at Gay’s the Word bookshop owing to pre-boarding tasks.

Our Matineé Experience

But the matinee, incurred by accident yesterday…. no matineé trays, nor matinee jackets, indeed no elegance tea-time service of any kind but one important whooshed-up coiffure and Sir William Right-Fog in the stalls – do you remember him? Also Malcolm Muggeridge, but Robert Nevil insisted he’s dead. Loved the play, called Flair Path, by Terry Ratty although it wasn’t at all PLRG in theme.  Sienna Miller (wrong frocks, not made by Val, I fear) had to chose between her husband and lover in a tragic kind of way, no question of some more advanced arrangement, as in Design for Living.

Hot Frock Tip for a City-Break

As you know, tomorrow I board for Rome. For a City-Break, which always occurs in milder or cold weather, put the emphasis on outer wear. It’s in the streets that you’ll be seen. Even in the restaurant you’ll be sitting down. Have at least three options for outer wear for a two-day break, if not four. I only have three.

Other Frock News

Preliminary assault on H Nicks yesterday to get the money back on those ripped Balenciaga slacks. ‘Manageress’ not there. To call me. I expect it’s that same orange one I encountered when returning the Burberry cardy that turned into the Balenciaga slacks. I hope she doesn’t remember.

Those Paul and Joe trews that got Risotto Milanese on them – I’ve got it out! (Do you remember: Joyce Grenfell: ‘Mrs Hingle, she’s got it out!’). The yellow stain (best saffron, you know) came right out.

So those slacks are back in circulation and packed for Rome.

Now my champagne cardy by Fabrizio de Carlo – that’s the one that got snagged in the Tudor House –  well, I’ve washed it. Risky. It’s a very loose knit and may never return to shape. At present it’s on the drying rack, looking anguished. Let’s hope that rack has not become a morgue by the time I regain from Rome.

Otherwise, I’ve been brushing and spot-cleaning the garments to be shipped to the Eternal City. How rarely do we really inspect our frockage, every square inch, and maid it to the bone. But dry cleaning is wrecking and washing not much better. Always dab and sponge if you possibly can.

Shock Lack of Pre-boarding Tension as I Prepare to Mount the Air for Rome

Astonishing: I’ve been, just, on the right side of the drama of outfit planning (no going back if wrong) and thrilling towards Rome, where I will wear outfits. Then, mid-afternoon, it came through that Peter Acharya and Ned Czernowski are to be there, by coincidente purissimo, and in a 4-star just round the corner from where I’ll be with Sonny Hammond. It bodes well: maybe, just maybe, we’ll break through to the burning inner core of Roman society, as we did in Paris in January, finding Bruno-France Bruno by chance just round the corner from the hotel and throbbing at the molten heart of high Paris life.

What about Prince Doria?

My Champagne Cardy by Fabrizio de Carlo in Torment after Washing

This Red Thing was Supposed to be Spring Green

Surprise Red Tulip on Top Terrace

Just a Few Spring Green Appeared on the Top Terrace

I Think This is the Unusual Blackcurrant Parrot Tulip About to Open. Was Intended to be with Spring Green

Wednesday 13^th April 2011

Robert Nevil’s got it now – the great biographer of the Pony Club. He’s been given two days by the Graph to do 1000 words on ‘Some Delightful Pony Breeds’. He will research, so it takes much longer than strictly necessary. He ought to phone up Val, that brilliantly fantastical PLRG, keen on a drop, who would introduce some previously unknown varieties of pony there and then. You can be sure of it – ‘The Sedgeland Heliotrope’, for instance, or ‘The Brent Cross Piebald Washer’. In the dreary afternoons of costume making, years ago, Val used to make up names for ladies’ stocking colours, with a wig-maker friend, since fallen out with – American Corpse, Caca de Dauphin and Bar Mitzvah Red, but that was a hair dye.

We must fight to save this supremely fragile Poor Little Rich Gay, Robert Nevil, who has also, wraque de nerve, as the French say, clicked on the wrong button. So we’re not going to the Terry Ratty play (no idea what it is, but he’s all the rage at the moment) at the Haymarket this evening, but this afternoon.

A matinee!

I haven’t been to a matinee since 1981 and that was by special arrangement, free tickets from the designer of the Michael Frayn effort – even then, you see, in at the top.

My own nerves have subsided a little. Yesterday at last I got the dusters washed but, would you believe it, I left out the drawing room one, so I’ve got that in soak now. Matching up that kitchen floor colour isn’t going so well. I put too much indigo in. I’m aiming for a yellowy grey. Will have to start again. I think maybe I need crome green not sap green. Can’t even remember if there is such a thing as crome green.

But I do love the names of the colours. Haven’t been involved with them for years, so thrilled to be amongst them again.

I haven’t a thing to wear for Rome. I haven’t mentioned it, have I? I board for Rome on Friday. I think I’m going to try and spot clean those risotto stains from my Paul and Joe tweedy slacks, despite risk of tide marks from the cleaning fluid – but in daylight to be sure of finding them. There’s just no time for Jeeves of Belgravia and the expense!

The slacks are light wool – perfect for mid-Spring in Rome. No rushing into summer clothes, even there, absolutely not.

And Rome is dressy, in my view.

This matinee catastrophe – we will embroider it. Maybe we’ll have matineé jackets – what are they? Or a matinee tray. That’s tea served at your seat. And I’m going to go round by Harvey Nicks first to amount an assault for my money back on those ripped Balenciaga slacks. I showed them to the tailor yesterday and he was outraged.

Monday 11^th April 2011

I’ve said and said. How many times have I said: ‘DON’T RUSH INTO SUMMER CLOTHES AT THE FIRST WHIFF OF HEAT.’ Light spring wools and cardies should be on hand until early June at least.

But what do I see? In this fine weather – young men, for it is mostly young men, idiotically going about in those horrible below-the-knee-amputation-shorts, T-shirts and sandals! At nine in the morning, in early April, with the temperature barely 13 degrees.

There are also sinister signs of that horrible yachting look creeping in for summer wear as I saw on show at Prada.

Are we seriously to believe that these people have  bagged up their winter clothes, sent all their heavy wools to the cleaners prior to summer storage, unbagged their summer wardrobe IN APRIL?

If the Government wants to make itself useful…

Apart from anything else, you know what summer clothes means, don’t you?

Yes! Shorts!

Ugh, ugh, ugh! No! No! No!

Before his dinner on Saturday Prince Dmitri sent out a newspaper article. It seems Tom Ford has been copying me. See below. ‘You’ll be welcome in anything,’ the Prince said, ‘except shorts.’

Well, he didn’t quite mean anything of course.

The Prince’s crackling was unsurpassed. But I don’t think he applied Val’s (you remember Val: supreme Poor Little Rich Gay on a shoestring; keen on a drop; fabulously ornamental) method of scoring the skin with a scalpel and using a precision measuring device to establish an exact distance of 4 mm between each cut. My architect, Bruce MacBain, who dined, identified all the Prince’s furniture immediately on arrival – Eileen Gray, Le Corb – then called for retail banks to be stopped from fiddling about on the Stock Market. Bruce has a portfolio which he self-runs, no broker, with unnatural (for a Poor Little Rich Gay) caution. It’s the Scottish side taking precedence. The Blond Multi and I, on the other hand, professed a passion for high risk if it brings lashings of profit.

All the same, I can’t bear an investment to collapse. I prefer to have it both ways.

Tancredo Viamare, Bruce’s partner (separate establishments, nights off) described how his car fell off the road into a ravine and turned over three times. Naturally he survived. The Photo Multi had acquired that morning an exclusive packet of seeds from the head of the Monmouth Coffee Company at Maltby Street (the new Borough Market). In addition to this provenance, the plant is one of the few that only grows in winter.

Today I’ve made progress with that floor damaged by Miroslav. Scraped away with one of Other Granny’s dinner knives. What a mess! Got to an appalling part of Rufus Pitman’s new novel where an Italian waiter has a ghastly toilet accident. Couldn’t bear to read on. Glad of diversion of floor.

Rufus also tells me that Ines de la Fressange has declared that you don’t need to wear all your diamonds all the time after a certain age. How wrong! Harry Rollo, only the other day, was calling for a massive increase in the level of diamonds for men.

So a lot of wrong in the frockage world just now!

Thank God it’s rained.

Tom Ford Copies My Views: Sorry, It Won't Go the Right Way Up

The Photo Multi's Exclusive Seeds

Sunday 10^th April 2011

Teeming! Just teeming with events, thoughts, projects, lists, engagements…

So much to tell and so little time.

Just let me say – I avoided breakdown. On Friday I was near, from the burden of the home, after Miroslav had been here painting the kitchen cupboards but also getting their yellow paint on the kitchen floor and inflicting masking tape injuries on that same floor, as well, of course, as covering the entire house in dust.

But what is a Poor Little Rich Gay to do? We are expanding economies. If we don’t grow, we die. Standards must rise and rise as the life goes on.

We can never stop, but not stopping we could explode.

This morning in the back garden, weeping with tasks. There was a family in the neighbour garden, just sitting, yapping, doing nothing. Extraordinary. Then I thought: I must have some pleasure, there must be some stillness. To start with nothing happened. Nerves throbbed on. Then, after an hour or so, slowly a little better: I think: ‘Those tulips are quite delicious, like a pudding’ and ‘What shades of green in the Springtime!’

So I will recover the kitchen floor. I’ve got the diluted paint mixed up for the task.

I think it’s territorial. Poor Little Rich Gays are never really satisfied with the work of others, as carried out in their homes. We’ve got to have a go at it ourselves. As soon as the cleaner’s out the way, I always put the duster round a bit myself; then perfection sets in.

But, look, I’ve got to rush. Apart from everything else, I’ve had a spate of being required at the last minute. As the Photo Multi never fails to say, ‘The truly powerful are always available.’ In fact four last-minutes came in last week, when only two items, Harry Rollo’s new performance piece, and Prince Dmitri Hersov’s dinner, were officially diarised.

So much for the intended quiet week.

Now I must dash, last minute, for the Multis. But oh! the immensity to tell: Val’s pimped a suit, Prince Dmitri’s crackling, Harry Rollo’s perf with satellite link from California, the Photo Multi’s exclusive seeds…

A Bizarre But Not Hideous Tulip Ensemble At Last: Professor Roentgen (Orange) and Honeymoon

Friday 8th April 2011

The home will be the death, I’m sure of it. I’ll keel while vac-ing.

No time. Absolute rush. I’ve had Miroslav here. Only two kitchen cupboard doors to be replaced apparently but ‘I believe me, we need you re-paint whole kitchen…’

So the new doors would match, you see.

Oh, work in the kitchen, the absolute worst. The heart of the home struck.

This afternoon, Aunt Lavinia rang to ask me over. Hurrah!  We tweak the home in order to leave it so it’s perfect to come back to. There’s always that chance, upon re-entry, of sudden happiness with the home.

I must keep calm. New work takes time to settle. There’s always the immediate aftermath, before the wound has healed… I’m thinking about Miroslav’s jagged edge I’ll have to pick at with a blade and the paint he’s managed to strip off the floor. I’ve had to have my acrylic colours out to mix up some more floor milk – sap green, burnt and raw umber, lamp black, indigo, naples yellow, with white, very dilute.

Miroslav's Jagged Edge - I will Attack with Blade and Artist's Paint Brush

Masking Tape Did This

My Paints for Mixing Floor Milk to Repair Above

Wednesday 6^th April 2011

Laura Malcolm, the novelist and prober of the French, gave a dinner. She and her husband, Matt Driver, the media brilliance, although an employee, but earning more than loathed Robin Smallmeal, head of landfill in this country or whatever, are honorary Poor Little Rich Gays for their suffering and endurance (they burn on the bare hillside of love) and their mania for detail in the home – even though cleaning is despised.

Laura’s menu! There were other guests – the Multis, my private architect, Bruce MacBain, his partner, Tancredo Viamare, and Esmé Manning, the actress, not seen for ages! I shrieked with excitement and she shrieked back, but then no more. I had a brief conference with Bruce about pipework – the menu swept all before it, I’m sorry to say.

Nothing else remains.

The detail! The 1^st course was three-part: speciality bread, Michel Guérard’s chicken liver terrine (the livers almost whole) with an onion confiture; then Ottolenghi oxtail with a complex parsley accompaniment and bulgur wheat, but finally, finally….a six-part dessert, taken from the current series of Masterchef.

Laura’s menus are always absolutely new.

An orange cake with a pomegranate ice cream styled into individual shapes, two salsas, one of pomegranate seeds, the other of carmelised oranges, then caramel shards and at the last a syrup of orange and pomegranate.

So, ordinary members of the public, learn!

By the way, should you think of copying this menu, you will require a Bruce MacBain interior in which to consume it: £200,000 and Miroslav, our adored Polish builder, in for two years.

By which time, it will be out of date.

As Laura says: what better way of keeping life’s horrors at bay.

I think she means death’s horrors, unless the terrible furnace and merciless exposure of love.

So we roar on, blazing, to the grave.

Laura Malcolm's Six-Part Dessert: Note the Glorious Absence of Plate Styling

The Caramel Shards

Monday 4th April 2011

Bruce MacBain, my personal architect, insisted on Majestic – unsurpassed for shower screens and cleanth (that’s cleanness) of design. No clumsy, lumpy metal column to secure it to the wall, just two gracious but assertive hinges.

So I forked £475.

The seal around the screen is a simple length of plastic that slides onto the glass. But part of it is hollow. Water gets in and, then… mould!

Bruce MacBain, what have you done! And Majestic! I bet the design team are ‘boys’ who’ve got dollies or wives wiping and rinsing.

Little point in gleaming miraculous hinges if you’ve got a fringe of black slime.

Now you may remember Andy Warhol’s friend, A, who cleaned, naked to reduce dust-generation, each letter of her type-writer with a fresh Q-tip. I keep Q-tips for applying bleach to stubborn stains but in a rage of inspiration I began to push one through the hollow plastic with a piece of wire. Difficult and delicate. One false move and there could have been a rupture. I’m sure Roland Mainflower, Ed Jasper’s heart doctor partner, must feel the same when pushing wires into people’s hearts to further life.  Slowly, slowly, with only one heart-stopping moment when it looked as if a Q-tip would be stuck in my shower-screen seal for good, it passed through … and cleansed! All black sludge gathered and removed.

Q-tip with Cleansed Shower-Screen Seal

Bruce MacBain-inspired Majestic Shower Screen. PLEASE NOTE the Upright Chrome Strip you see on the Left is the Edging for the Tiles. It is Not Part of the Screen

Sunday 3^rd April 2011

Barely a second since the last tulip season but here they are again, advanced  in my front area not least by the steam from my steam-condensing boiler, an installation inspired by Bruce MacBain, my personal architect.

I had planned, for my front area, a combination of ‘Princess Irene’, bronze-gold with a strange lick of dull purple, ‘Coleur Cardinal’, a really good church red and ‘Apricot Beauty’, speaks for itself. It was always going to be controversial. The first thing that happened was two perfectly monstrous knicker-pink outrages appeared, not ‘Apricot Beauty’, and no sign of any of the others. Then a whole lot more, actual ‘Apricot Beauty’, followed by, but really too late to combine, an unordered white tulip, the odd, intended ‘Princess Irene’ and ‘Coleur Cardinal’ as expected. With ‘Apricot Beauty’ largely over in some pots, I’ve ended up therefore with a perfectly serviceable but just a little municipal red and white scheme.

Two things went wrong: Amand of Clamp Hill, Stanmore incorrectly described ‘Apricot Beauty’ as a mid-season tulip when it is in fact early. But if I’d planted the bulbs on their sides they might have been delayed sufficiently to flower with the other two.  Otherwise Amand muddled up the varieties. box.

It’s all very well, but how many tulip seasons have I left? It could be only twenty, or thirty or none.

Tulips are absolutely preferred by Poor Little Rich Gays to daffodils. Why? There’s quite a lot wrong with them. They have unwieldy leaves, which can get battered or eaten or in other ways unsightly, and which also mean that the bulbs can’t be planted very close together. The display is always rather sparse. Daffodils, on the other hand, which I’ve been secretly growing on my upstairs terrace, acquired at rock-bottom prices in February from Columbia Road, keep their leaves out of the way until after flowering and can be packed together in a delightful festive mass.

But they’re yellow, on the whole. Sebastian Archer and Robert Nevil once nearly fell into their private lake at the mention of a yellow flower. And altogether too cheerful and straightforward, dancing away in the wind, as Wordsworth required.

Tulips are solitary, dignified, just a little cold, and not yellow (with exceptions). The stems don’t move but the flowers behave in a very odd way, opening up almost to the point of disintegration in the sun and deepening in colour, before reverting to their new-born state in the evening. The proud single blooms, rising above their disgraceful foliage, demand careful inspection of their strange, unlikely, unapparent markings.

Difficult, high, not quite right, superb, Tulips are not as others.

'Apricot Beauty' in the Foreground, 'Coleur Cardinal' to the Left, Unknown White, then another 'Apricot Beauty' gone quite Red in the Sun

'Apricot Beauty' Gone Red in the Sun, one 'Princess Irene' Lurking

'Coleur Cardinal' and Unknown White Tulip

'Princess Irene' Solo

'Coleur Cardinal' Solo

Thursday 31^st March 2011

It started in a small way. You remember those chestnut brown Prada slacks I bought at Christmas in the sale, left in the shop for alteration, then forgot about? Well, after retrieving and wearing four times, a few bobbles appeared in the thigh area. So down they went to the drawing room (where mending takes place) for the lumps to be pushed back into the fabric with a needle.

But within a few days I had the following on my hands:

• Black Balenciaga slacks (reduced from £450) ripped from the occupant (me) climbing over a railing to get to Plant Organic. I had also sat in some Blu-Tac
• Herringbone Paul and Joe trews – three risotto grains fell on: stained
• Honey-beige Margiela – arse seam split

Can you imagine my disquiet and sense of menace?

Those Balenciaga are going straight back to H. Nicks, to from whence they came. Shoddy, absolutely second-rate and criminal – that they should rip from normal behaviour such as heaving over a fence.

Am looking forward to the scene.

Ripped Balenciaga

Martin Margiela - arse seam ripped

Prada Chestnut Brown Slacks - Bobble

Prada Chestnut Brown - General View

Paul and Joe Herringbone - Risotto Stain