Saturday 26^th March 2011

Scotts – it’s a restaurant in Mayfair. You may have heard of it.

I was there last night with the Australian branch of the Poor Little Rich Gays. Sonny Hammond, over from Rome (whence I hope to board shortly), Connor Cadoux, now restored to London from Brussels and re-deployed in one of the best banks, and Storm Benson, who is actually Canadian.

Storm thought it was J. Sheekey’s so was late. It could only have been J. Sheekey’s, the Ivy or Scott’s.

The Australian Poor Little Rich Gays are high, high, but also low, low, as we shall see. Whatever field they’re in, they lead it. Connor is unsurpassed in financial regulation. He is planning a £70,000 refurb of his apartment but filthy Lambeth Council (Joanna Lumley is a neighbour) have turned it down. This is how we started. Connor had a Martini, of course. Nothing will stop this refurb, also of course. Then we plunged. Storm is just returned from Sydney. There was a vast terrain to cover. Now be warned, the Australian Poor Little Rich Gays are filthy. At a gathering, an appalling, peeling, blistered old queen in tiny shorts had shown his parts, merely by way of illustration, not with any evil design. ‘I don’t even know you,’ Storm had protested. The waiter couldn’t help smiling, I noticed, as he poured. Elsewhere in Sydney, a Poor Little Rich Gay had bitten off the ear of a sauna bouncer. So it went on. Rent boys, kept boys, cocks, bums,  pyscotic, knife-wielding trade, rape charges. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not listening,’ the waiter said. Nearby diners were soon small heaps of ash, swept up with waiterly grace by the waiters – an unusual duty for them, you’d have thought.

They’re still shocked, you know, after all these years.

Over  pudding, we were all quite agreed about agapanthus. Such a good plant for a pot, although it might break it. Flowers long-lasting. And architectural.

Connor complained about his steak (£30). ‘Tough,’ he said. An official appeared. Connor bantered, smiled and waved him and his offer (whatever it was) away. At  least the twin aims of Poor Little Rich Gays re: staff were achieved: to terrorise and to entertain as never before.

I don’t think we’ll take Scott’s again. Dubious unknown international clientele. Brown interior. Horrid common fake flames outside, just pieces of cloth being blown. £113.90 each.

Wednesday 23^rd March 2011

My black cashmere cardy went bobbly. Only had it in September. Bought at the Prada Factory Shop, Montevarchi (beside the Autostrada del Sole) with the money saved from paying for the villa last summer. What I mean is the others bought all the food, so it felt free. Prince Dmitri and I had forked in advance of course and by the time actually there the massive wound to the finances had healed.

Isn’t money funny? Did you listen to the Cancelleria’s budget speech? They had it on the Radio. I couldn’t believe that they didn’t cut to something else.

But my cardy went bobbly before Christmas. Jeeves of Belgravia said they could do something about it. Maybe. But it was returned still old dog. I hung it in the wardrobe and tried to forget. Then, sudden flash, great gash of inspiration – I remembered my De-fuzzing device, bought years ago to tackle a Nicole Farhi knit that bobbled terrible.

Was it where it should be? The device. Yes, it was. So I got that cardy splayed on the floor, absolutedly kneed to the floor. And scraped, and scraped, and scraped; a good hour, Poor Little Rich Gays, and you must back up with an excellently stern clothes brush. The whole experience was as difficult for me as for the cardy, I can tell you. Ghastly slugs of black wool all over the place.

But it worked. My cardy restored. I could have driven through the streets to St Paul’s for a Service of Thanksgiving, so rare is redemption.

Now Joshua Baring, our youngest Poor Little Rich Gay and the voice for the future, tells me that you can put your knits in the freezer overnight and they’ll never bobble again. But he’s checking the process, so don’t try it at home just yet.

My Black Prada Cardy - Before Scraping

My Black Prada Cardy After Scraping

The Implements Required

The Mess Involved

Monday 21^st March 2011

Massive: at Trenton’s Gallery, for Beatrice Cantor’s opening, Elsa Hodgeman, the Gertrude Stein de nos jours, her mother, Lady Newell, now superbly restored after her awful accident, Chris Ofili, Isaac Julien, Professor Stella Delaney .

Lashings of Poor Little Rich Gays: Laura Malcolm, Matt Driver, Prince Dmitri Hersov, Bruce MacBain, Tancredo Viamare, Ned Czernowski and others too grand to stir from their apartment building owing to lassitude or the lift not working – in other words, not there.

And tragic No! Beyond belief! Despite salaries exceeding Smallmeal’s (he the loathed Head of Landfill or whatever in this country), not all Poor Little Rich Gays were used at the after dinner – although it must be known that Prince Dmitri Hersov refused.

But Yes! Grayson. Yes! Grayson! Grayson was there.  I fingered his frock, which was a Bo-Peep cape really. The idea was the Post-It notes you stick on the backs of your ‘mates’ at school (Grayson has ‘mates’), scawls of penises etc but here laminated and rendered as couture, as Grayson explained to me personally, Adrian Edge, in his gruff motor-bike voice.

Laura Malcolm has always been rather. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘he’s made such an effort to be different and everybody’s thinking: “So what?”

Well, I wasn’t.

But how wrong to go on about Grayson. What about Beatrice ?  The creator, the giver of the Art Show! But so far from strident or grabbing. She does portraits; they’re either huge or small, many of young women of today found in magazines.  You think: that’s an annoying person: or, she needs to buck up. But there’s much, much more to it: this work is alarmingly ambiguous, fearless, uncompromising. These flimsy girls are forged anew: they are simultaneously flayed and transfigured into enduring presences. The Multis are big collectors. Her huge double portrait of them I’m sure will be a classic, along with all the other great double portraits such as by Gainsborough, Hockney, Velasquez and Goya.

Without, a special fat moon hung, the fattest moon we’re likely to see in our days apparently. Poor Little Rich Gays graphed it in the interludes from viewing

I ascended to the dinner floor. Upstairs in the gallery 100 dined in utterly modern, white, vast circumstances. They were either very good, or very bad, very left-wing or very right, very rich or very poor. Either Beatrice’s bad brother, Flint Cantor, whose subversions abound in the Press, or Trenton himself, the gallerist, who had only gained this country an hour before. ‘I was at an Opening in New York last night,’ he told me in his Upper East Side drawl, although resident near Tottenham Court Road. Either a performance artist who dances with furniture (never nervous before a perf. or during but aggressive for twenty minutes afterwards and then needy for another twenty) or a Young Money who bought a contemporary Greek work: ‘That was in 2005 when £10,000 was a lot to spend.’ Now not so sure about it.

As we were winding down the Photo Multi announced a lunch at the Penthouse for the next day. Someone huge over from Beatrice’s New York Gallery; all flung together at the last minute. Beatrice and Seth absolutely free.

As the Photo Multi often says: ‘The truly powerful are always free. Only the weak have a full diary.’

So the Art World: it’s a whole way of life.

The New York Greatness was superb: male, cheekbones, bronzer, staying at the Connaught; announced serious dyslexia, has to show addresses to cab drivers on his phone rather than attempt to read himself. Lovely vulnerable side.

Saturday 19th March 2011

They gave me two vials for free. Acqua di Parma Assoluta. I’ve been sustained in fume for nearly two weeks. In fact I’m wearing it now although it’s not really an evening fume. I must get some more Creed. I’ve been out for months.

Just off to Beatrice Cantor’s opening at Trenton’s Gallery. Everybody will be there, including, you can be sure, Grayson… our friend, in bonnet and with basket. I’m wearing a very difficult Niccolo Ceschi Berrini outfit, so I shall be tucking in all evening. The Multis have brought in innumerable Poor Little Rich Gays but it’s not clear which of them are being used for the sit-down dinner and which pitched out after the PV.

We shall see.

My one wish is to remain upright. It’s one of those days when I’m thinking: not even eight full-time staff could scratch the surface of the work to be done in the home. I’m dizzy with the tasks. On Thursday at a party given by one near the Throne I was reunited with a university acquaintance after 30 years. He’d had a heart attack and two strokes or possibly three.

Only 53, the same age as me.

Acqua di Parma Assoluta Free Sample from Space NK

Wednesday 16^th March 2011

It occurs to me after my experience of addressing Ashringford Cathedral on Friday that Poor Little Rich Gays are often called upon to give talks. Ordinary members of the public reel in horror at nearly everything else to do with us, but they love our talks – the hypocrites.

Then I recalled that Royston Buster, one of our great Committee/Chairperson/Wheeler-dealer Poor Little Rich Gays, gave a talk not a month ago to the Garden History Society about the less well-known parks and forests of London over which he wields huge influence. The audience was mostly grey woollies with knapsacks and hiking boots (well, not quite).

So here’s how to give a talk the Poor Little Rich Gay Way:

• Veer alarmingly between high brainy style and baby talk, with, if possible non-grammar: ‘Investment in the regeneration of one forgotten London park by the Heritage Lottery Fund has a sussuration throughout all the neglected green spaces of the capital, whether we donate or not.’ Then: ‘They’ve done dendrology on that tree trunk….’ ‘They put deer in front of this hunting lodge so Queen Elizabeth could ping at them with her bow and arrow.’ This use of ‘they’ is delightful and will make you sound normal to the audience. Also refer often to ‘my favourite…’ as it ‘my favourite herbaceous border’ ‘my favourite garden ornament …’
• Bring in Her Present Majesty at unlikely moments: ‘From the top of Richmond Hill you can see if she’s in residence at Windsor with her flag flying.’
• Have a bizarre drink with you, in this case a self-made sloe wine
• Name-dropping, of course.  Dan …(slight pause).. Pearson, Molly…Salisbury…Lucinda…Lambton
• Hint at wild, illegitimate life beyond the ken of the audience: drunken cycling along the canal tow path. Gardens have same effect as sex (they’ve done research); if you’ve done it once, you want to do it again…
• Show pictures of self opening an environmental car park: solemn Mayor standing by with gold chain, self bent double and spinning out of orbit, helpless with laughter. Don’t explain but begin shrieking in the same manner.
• How to end talk about public green spaces of London: ‘This is a picture of a lupin in my own garden. I think it’s the best really.’ Roar with laughter and stagger about as great gale of applause engulfs…

Sunday 13^th March 2011

Friday, this gone. Quite a day.  By train to Ashringford for my godmother’s funeral where I was to deliver the tribute. I’d seen little of her in recent years. She had no love of decor, food or frockage (in fact had wood chip paper and basic white paint, not even magnolia) but carried out good works with excellent efficiency, served on committees, was Chair, Governor, raised money, saved some historic marshes. I thought we had little in common.

Why me to offer the tribute? The ceremony was to be at Ashringford Cathedral, where she had been a tremendous volunteer and participant, but surely only in a corner of the vast building, one of our bigger cathedrals, you know.

Well, you won’t believe it. On arrival the family, accompanied by me, Adrian Edge, clucked  the entire length of the nave, coffin securely established before the High Altar, choir and large part of the nave occupied, 500 thought to be present, elaborate bouquet of clergy, full singing choir, organ. Tremendous solemnity and religion, then in the middle of it all, me, carrying on, doing my tribute, in Prada bootees, tiny suit by Lindberg, asides tossed out (‘I knew I’d get that wrong’), funny stories, money (she had money), career brought in, how she liked outrageous clothes (I meant the time she admired my very swirly, many coloured Paul and Joe knit one Christmas), all the time, clutch of clergy sitting behind bristling, thinking ‘How did Larry Grayson get in here?’ and ‘Bring on the incense’ (there was incense).

Then we processed out again, entire length, while the choir sang. I felt like Olga in the Chekov short story, ‘The Grasshopper’ who’d always thought her husband Dymov awfully dreary and unimportant until he died and she found out he was huge in the disease world, massive figure. She seemed so modest, this godmother, with her Ford Fiesta. Who’d have thought she’d give the chance for a Poor Little Rich Gay to take over Ashringford Cathedral?

There’s a lesson in this. But what is it? Anyway my bit was liked, you know, and rather more than the rival tribute by the Canon, about the pilgrimage through life to death.

So then it was back to London, drained and saddened. Do not think Poor Little Rich Gays mock at death or only see opportunities for aggrandisement. We are hard, but not hard-hearted, nor limited. We weave death in – even the Multis, who are perhaps the most death-resistant. The Photo Multi said: ‘Why are you going to a funeral? You should spend more time with the living.’ But he only said this in outrageous defiance thereby conceding more than an inch to death.

Speaking of which, it was home, re-frock, telephone the Gay Mother to brief on the funeral, then out to Maltby Street, Bermondsey for the Blond Multi’s birthday subscription dinner. £25 a head. They paid for the wine. Maltby Street is the scene of  the new Saturday food market, great rival to Borough and championed this season by the Multis as you know. The son of the founder of Monmouth Coffee, whose headquarters and coffee shop are next door, offers dinner here every Friday. It’s absolutely huge and all over the papers. You dine in a lock-up under the arches, trains rumbling overhead, no heating, brown paper tablecloth; Mad Frankie Fraser and the Kray Twins might appear at any minute with vicious intent.

Set menu; excellent. Can’t recommend it enough. Absolutely Poor Little Rich Gay: rare, bizarre and outstanding.

Present: Prince Dmitri Hersov (very down on Prince Andrew, just back from Volvo, Sweden, on accounting work: lovely reception area), my architect Bruce MacBain (vice-like embrace: ‘How many ribs have I broken?’ he enquires jauntily), his partner, Tancredo Viamare (Bruce MacBain creating some pre-bedroom excitement by vigorously snogging others on parting and greeting), Beatrice Cantor, the artist (big opening next week: I’ll be there), Seth Wright, the artist, Elsa Hodgeman, the Gertrude Stein de nos jours, Prof Stella Delaney of the Art School.

View from Table at Blond Multi's Birthday Dinner in Lock-up Under the Arches, Bermondsey

Table Setting with Brown Paper Table Cloth at Blond Multi's Birthday Dinner, Bermondsey

Reception at Volvo Sweden, Liked by Prince Dmitri Hersov, Who Went There

Thursday 10th March 2011

Poor Little Rich Gays normally dread sunshine in the home. It blasts to the fore every speck of dust.  But this blue-white Spring light at close of day  is so cleansing, better than Windolene. Suddenly I am filled with the radiance of a right home. Just for once, my home is right, not cracked nor scuffed nor stained nor worse than other homes, especially Robert Nevil and Sebastian Archer’s.

Wednesday 9th March 2011

Val, our supreme Poor Little Rich Gay, who weaves through, in, against, inspite of, and with a vast vat of alcohol, a wrought and brilliant life, is  championing the Alpine look for late winter/early Spring.  He heard about it on the telly but he’s done it Norwegian, or Norwayan as we prefer to say because of Hamlet.

You know the Norwayan Alps, of course?

First of all he self-knitted a cardy. Some of the wool was re-cycled. Other pieces were unravelled. It’s hard to follow. Some sections didn’t match and had to be  dipped in coffee to knock them back colourwise. The pewter-clasps were transferred from a previous Norwayan cardy Val had clacked and clicked into existence while on secondment to the frock department of the Olso Opera House many years ago. The Norwayan gloves were already in stock, given as a leaving present from that same opera house. That left the hat. There had to be a hat. Val reclaimed the wool from a former SAS balaclava (he did, honest) and rendered it, by means of a sherling lamb trim (in stock and left over from some diva’s costume) Norwayan, but also Mongolian with a hint of Yurt.

Then,after all that, it warmed up in early February. Val sweltering in his Alpine look. But the recent cold snap a godsend. And there will be many more opportunities for it yet – and your Alpine look too when you get it.

The ways things are looking, we’ll be Alpine all the summer long in any case –  for lack of anything else. I couldn’t believe the modes on offer at Prada. Nautical. Yachting. Blue and white stripes. Unspeakable. Hard colours, hard contrast, dreadful canvas smocks.

Poor Little Rich Gays must refuse for once.

I wonder if we will.

Val's Look Inspired by the Norwayen Alps: This Cardy is Self-Made

Horrid Yachting Look at Prada for the Summer

Boat-neck Gabardine Yachting Smock-Top from Prada. Thank God Don't Have to Have £485

Drab Nautical Top-lettes from Prada: What on Earth will We Wear this Summer? Can't Wear This

Prada's Summer Suggestions: I Don't Think So

Dunhill Summer Mode - Better

Wednesday 9th March 2011

I didn’t quite catch the Blond Multi yesterday, my sketch was lacking. The Blond Multi is probably the most important living example of how the Poor Little Rich Gay, at his best, tunnels mercilessly towards his goals, is achievement-driven, goal-oriented (yes! it’s jargon) but never drear, never a swot, always vibrant, in full avoidance of even near normal.

Tuesday 8th March 2011

Today is the 47th birthday of the astonishing Blond Multi, that superb property and company owner as well as outstanding Poor Little Rich Gay.  A Brideshead lookalike of 6’2″ from youth, he has worn remarkable footwear by Jeffrey West and cufflinks from junk shops. His look is City/ Golden Youth of Oxford gone mad. But, as with other PLRGs, he has woven in more servicable, ‘normal’ qualities that might suggest a grasp of reality: he  is diplomatic, a mollifier and conciliator. Despite immense wealth, he has not hardened into viciousness but still wears a touching vulnerablity, when not invited, on his sleeve. In his spare time he likes to take Grade 1 piano or did. He is never unoccupied.