Saturday 20^th November 2010

Actually it was last Saturday, but this Saturday too, suddenly, without explanation, I am refreshed and powerful.

Saturday is my favourite day. Lunch on a weekday is my favourite repast – after a busy morning.

On Saturdays Poor Little Rich Gays shop, renew, re-make, re-style, revive; they banish decay.  They do not accept nor give lunch, they do not gallery or tour.

Last Saturday I re-plated my home. As you know, one of my biggest regrets is that, in early life, I chose the matching-set path. If only I’d gone harlequin, by now, like the late Claude Purcell, I could have had a fabulous collection of miscellaneous glasses, plates and bowls.

But no, I plunged tragically into the narrow, bourgeois prison of the matching set.

Is it too late? Last Saturday finally I went up to the china lady in Camden Passage (that’s an antiques’ mall in London’s heart) and bought – yes, a harlequin set ….of dinner plates. £180 for eight. Two thrown in for free. While I was about it I took two cup and saucer with a fabulous strawberry pattern and another Griffin-marked Rockingham saucer, which the Gay Granny always claimed, wrongly as it turns out, were tremendously rare. This one in fact was also thrown in for free, because so chipped and cracked.

I do urge you – buy old china, please do. I don’t mean the awful blue and white striped Cornish ware from the 50s or (ugh! ugh!) Suzy Cooper, so adored by PLRG and leading food writer and stylist, Angus Willis. I mean 18^th or 19^th century, all the old names, Worcester, Derby, Wedgewood, New Hall.

Of course not all of you have the advantage of an exclusive upbringing with a Gay Mother and Gay Granny who talked of nothing but vicars and china marks. But don’t be afraid. Launch out. You can get all these joyous, hand-made, hand-painted utterly exclusive and unique minor glories for just a few pounds, so infinitely superior to modern rubbish.

It’ll be coming back – old china. Buy, buy, buy before it’s too late.

When I got back from the china shop, buoyant with purchase, I re-styled my hall shelf. It has long been lacking and the entrada is so important. I pitched out some gloopy glass vases. I was going to put the strawberry-pattern cups and saucers but they didn’t fit. Instead I’ve got a plastic Chinese soldier given me by Aunt Lavinia from the Terracotta Soldiers Exhibition, a Wedgewood dish I had anyway in stock but not in use and an uncertain modern bowl moved from elsewhere and come back to life in its new place.

Last night at Robert Nevil’s I saw a bronze of a discus thrower which would be more perfect for my hall. But he kicked up a fuss when I put it in my bag.

Poor Little Rich Gays cling on to their possessions in unexpected ways.

My New Old Harlequin Set of Dinner Plates

Strawberry Pattern Cup and Saucer

My Hall Shelf Before Re-Styling

My Hall Shelf After Re-Styling

Wednesday 17th November 2010

Something’s not right. I’ve been troubled. I find I must veer from the suggestion in my last posting that Poor Little Rich Gays are unfortunate, if not warped, people who don’t love people, nasty.

That’s the Earls Court Gays, with whom the PLRGs are easily confused, even by me, their chronicler. The Earls’ Court Gays set their gorgeous bleached teeth against hurt and muddle. At the first sign of trouble they ‘move on’. Cliché is their harbour.

But most Earls Court Gays turn out to be Poor Little Rich Gays on closer examination – who are braver. For even the most extreme there is one person at least who is allowed to be indispensible, although it might not be exactly the one you’d expect.

I am myself a Modernist as well as an Austenite. To be known and understood absolutely as you are, what is intolerable or rather marvellous or simultaneously intolerable and marvellous, is a rare thing. Few have it, despite much romance.

Whatever their suffering and peculiarity, Poor Little Rich Gays have one great consolation. They do not flinch, neither from themselves nor anything else. They see, or strive to. Is this why they have the gift of friendship, more often than not?

Come back tomorrow: I’ve been buying china and visiting Strawberry Hill.

Sunday 14th November 2010

‘Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it.’ John Donne, Meditation XVII

Not what you were expecting – as an opening?

Miles Kent has written a double biography of his parents-in-law, as it were, the parents of his partner, Leon de Vere. Wednesday was the launch, at Daunt Books in Marylebone High Street, where Poor Little Rich Gays were seen twice last year if you recall.

Sir Melton Drax de Vere was a poet, knighted for his poetry and services to literature. He died in the 80s. His wife, Lady Hanna, yet lives, adored, although too ill to attend on Wednesday. Launching the book, Miles spoke of home, how Sir Melton and Lady Hanna’s home was home to him. He and Leon actually lived in the house in St John’s Wood in the 80s; but there was a larger sense too. It was a home for gays; Sir Melton had a gay past, Lady Hanna was keen. In those days, even today, parents did not normally embrace without question and bring to lodge in this way. Miles mentioned the stray electrician, who lived in the attic for three years, supposedly re-wiring the house. But there were great names coming through the front door downstairs. This home was snug at the heart of this nation’s creative life. I visited it myself several times, as did Robert Nevil, who tried on Lady Hanna’s frocks. Grandeur and a reassuring vintage cognac pervasion of old money,fading a little, was also its allure; the drawing room was lined floor to ceiling with museum-type paintings in gilt frames. Some of them later turned out to be worth a fortune.

Yet this home was on a short lease from the Church Commissioners. There was always anxiety lurking about its future. Sir Melton had been, until his forties, an unhappy gay. Then he met the much younger Hanna, herself virtually an orphan, lonely and vulnerable. They married and blossomed. Miles, as I’m sure he won’t mind my mentioning, is himself a kind of orphan who found home in the home of two such people.

What of the happy home life of other Poor Little Rich Gays? Where is home for them? The actual home, as we know, might be being heaved over, up-heaved, made new. It rarely rests. Or in, at home, is dull. Out is really home. Out, perhaps, at the office, achieving, proving, rising, earning, running the country. Or home is the full diary, full months in advance. Home, for some, means no home for others. Poor Little Rich Gays must be in charge, must be mother. Or there is making, incising the pork’s skin with a scalpel every 5 millimetres, as Val did in Glasgow last year, to get the crackling right; the raw material, whatever it may be, must be styled, shaped, re-made, got right. Few Poor Little Rich Gays, especially those with mothers or ever at prep and public or both would echo or believe the words of Gordon Brown in May, ‘And as I leave the second most important job I could ever hold I cherish even more the first, as a husband and a father.’ Today I visited Strawberry Hill with Robert Nevil (I’ll tell you soon). He was wearing, with superb prancing, glancing aplomb, a coat passed on, because either not fitting or not liked, by his partner’s other special friend. It fitted Robert Nevil all right.

So let us remember those Poor Little Rich Gays who do not know or do not choose to know a normal home life: Val, Harry Rollo, Reggie Cresswell, Joshua Baring, Robert Nevil, me:Adrian Edge, Lord Arrowby, Arjan Bose, Ned Boule, Stephan Jäger, Conor Cadeaux, Prince Dmitri Hersov, Angus Willis, Marcus Cargill, Sebastian Archer, Fergus Strachan, Simeon Bond …

Friday 12th November 2010

Friday 13th by a whisker.
I’m not actually in a clinic. Merely I ought to be. My dinner thoughts are getting out of hand. Last Saturday I gave a dinner, the Saturday before that I received one, at Peter Acharya and Ned Czernowksi’s. Next week I take three dinners in a row, on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
Peter and Ned are superb, purring, untroubled dinner-givers. Their table is glass, mounted with fine drinking glass. It is a confection, rising to a peak apparently, dotted with silver items such as napkin rings. Ned is an architect. The apartment is beautiful, not a fault in the workmanship, and no flexes trailing, all styled away.
One guest said to another, ‘Who’s your jacket by?’ but didn’t wait, just wrenched it open to view the label. We all agreed this is the only approach, although care must be taken not to break the neck if targeting a jumper or shirt. Peter caused outrage at the Acropolis recently where an official was complaining about Lord Elgin taking the marbles. ‘It’s a pity he didn’t get the lot. Anyway, they wouldn’t be much use to you now, with your debt problem. You’d have to sell them.’ He also made a shopgirl remove her jeans so he could buy them but that wasn’t in Greece. We saw his baby photos. At six, Peter had bunches; two older sisters kept him as a girl. Ned said his bedtime lullaby when a baby was his mother belting out ‘Hello Dolly’.
Before dinner we visited another apartment where some gays were clambering into drag. Later we saw them coming back from wherever they’d been. See graphs below.
Then there was my own dinner, attended as it happens by Ned and Peter, as well as the Multis, Conor Cadoux and some darling straights from Trenton’s gallery. Conor was incoherent for quite a lot of the time.
Do you know, horror to say it, but I’m just a little off Ottolenghi. That was my menu. All that tahini, green crunch, pomegranate seeds, labneh (see yesterday’s posting), you do rather long for a stout cheese sauce.
Let’s hope it’s just a phase.
But that’s not the point. I don’t think I’m the only Poor Little Rich Gay condemned to entertain but flayed alive by the experience. I recall Smallmeal lurking inadequate at his own great functions. After all, why bother with face, hair, frockage, food, decor, home, personality if it’s not to be seen? And we must share, reach out, give; we cannot sit alone all our days. Nothing will come of nothing. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
But what drives us to ever greater heights of matching sets, finer wines, grander and more expansive guest lists is also what prises us apart, exposes, wounds.
After one of my dinners, I think ‘Never again!’ I’m inconsolable.
Well, what’s to be done? Maybe I should phone up The Priory. There must be a short course available. I imagine a glass of hot water to sip while I’m therapised.
Memory mercifully rearranges experience into more pleasant forms; it also poisons. There have been happy dinners, even large ones. There will be again.
Do you know, I’m tending towards Christmas drinks – 40 people or 50 or 500.

The Draggists Return - Do You Like the Silver Wig?

Thursday 11th November 2010
I knew I’d have to go to Edgware Road, miles away – as soon as I saw it was Lebanese. Labneh, that is. It’s strained yoghurt.
But still I dragged against my fate.
I’d been hurtled by Ottolenghi, needless to say, into an unfamiliar recipe for my dinner last Saturday. Sea bass with labneh, preserved lemon and tomato salsa.
I tried Borough Market, a restaurant near Borough Market and two other local shops. ‘Are you Lebanese?’ I demanded of the bewildered owners. It was hopeless, as I’d known really all along it would be. There was no avoiding it. I must embrace Edgware Road, where the Lebanese shops are.
I could have made do with ordinary yoghurt; Borough Market had yielded up preserved lemons at least (there’s a big drama with Borough Market, by the way; essentially it’s been replaced).
On the other hand, I absolutely could not – make do, that is.
So I gained Edgware Road, the Marble Arch end. Luckily I knew that, because it’s ten miles long. I forged into a likely looking store. Yes, they’d got labneh. I had a religious moment. But there was more stoniness to come. In the fridge, they said, on the left. I faced rows of milky products labelled in Arabic. Which was it? I asked another assistant who mumbled that labneh’s a drink but handed me a pot of solid-looking white stuff, beaming in a curiously irrelevant way. I couldn’t have been less convinced but I was too polite not to buy it, hatching a plot the while to try another shop. ‘What is this?’ I asked, in the other shop, wielding the Arabic product. ‘It’s labneh,’ they said, ‘but very cheap.’ I bought some of theirs, more expensive.
So I was double-labneh. It’s quite nice.
What an adventure though, going to Edgware Road. It’s very exotic, just as if you were actually in Lebanon.

Cheap Labneh - What How do You Know?

Sunday 7^th November 2010

We haven’t seen or heard of Lord Arrowby for months. Then, on Friday, he texts.  Does he want to be back in?

To remind: he’s my part-time love interest, when I remember. Recently I’ve rather forgotten. He stalks the highest corridors of power in some mysterious back-room capacity. It is said he carries ultimate responsibility for solving the problem of the aging population (too many of them). In personality, he is a perfect demonstration of the Poor Little Rich Gay type – paradoxical, stern, grave, then giggly, given to intimate confidences, then remote, answerable to no-one, likely to induce in certain people a feeling that he might be saved. Art collection, recently taken up in a big way with designer clothes and grooming products, blue eyes, quite a looker. The last time I invited him, in June, he said, ‘What are you lobbying for now?’ It was funny and delicious. I began to wonder whether my attentions weren’t going to his head.

Anyway on Friday he texts – at some length. ‘I’m in your hood.’ That’s front-syllable lopping, my invention. He meant ‘neighbourhood.’ ‘Hood’ is also ‘childhood’. He was visiting single parents and the unemployed in their homes. I’m not quite sure why. Maybe to find out if they intend to become part of the over-expanded aging population in due course. It all sounds very Coalition Government.

Later – another text. He’s back from the Unemployed. I wonder if he lunched with them. Now he’s at Paul and Joe, getting a discount because it’s raining.

Paul and Joe! That’s quite an extreme frock designer.

What did you buy?

No reply.

Saturday 6^th November 2010

My Boscoe Holder, ‘Tobago Wedding’, arrived from Trinidad on Thursday.  It’s superb, the brushwork so fine and it turns out the bride has two expressions, depending on viewpoint.  I’ve been buying more, but where’s the money? Then there was that delirious last-minute Ivy dinner on Wednesday. How happy we were.  Three Poor Little Rich Gays and three women without men. The Multis and me, Beatrice Cantor, the painter, a cat-loving picture editor and the costume-designing wife of a well-known film director. No arse. No side. We held up parts of life with no particular cachet and looked at them with pleasure in the light (that’s a metaphor). The Costume-Designer lifts napkins from restaurants. At the end, the doorman came to the table to say there were no taxis (because of the tube strike). She said, kicking up red lacquer heels, ‘If you can get me some sensible shoes I’ll walk back.’ He said: ‘Well, there’s the napkins. You could tie them round your feet.’ She said, holding coyly up one of the Ivy monogrammed ones: ‘I’ve got heaps of these at home already.’  The Photo Multi had been to an auction at Sotheby’s beforehand, stood in a doorway at the back and bid. But he breathed not a word. Only afterwards did he reveal the ordeal. Bidding from the back, for Beatrice Cantor’s work as it happens, everybody turns to stare at you. The Photo Multi is unbelievably forward but terribly shy.

Tonight my dinner at home for eight seems to trip over last Saturday’s dinner at Peter Acharya and Ned Czernowski’s, yet to be covered. We saw people in drag but they weren’t actually there. Now there’s trouble with Borough Market and Lord Arrowby has re-loomed.

So much to think about. Come back tomorrow. I’ve got my pinny on. There’s also been a saga over labneh. Do you know what it is?

So much to tell.

Wednesday 3^rd November 2010

Today is the 53^rd birthday of Anthony Mottram, first met by me at the housemaster’s introductory tea-party in 1970, presently semi-estranged and pretending not to be in London.

The Photo Multi has just summoned me to the Ivy, last minute, at 8.30. Beatrice Cantor is to be there, after the triumphant sale of her paintings at Sotheby’s.

But I’m only just back from lunch at Soho House with Ed Jasper, the bed linen expert, and, before that I was barely out of bed (bed linen not as advised by Ed, sadly) from Arbutus Restaurant  last night with Conor Cadoux, who is back in London from Brussels, where he has been running the Euro Parl.

Conor showed me a schedule for refurb of his flat. £50,000. It said ‘Stelrads’. I struck that out. Stelrad is that bog-standard radiator which wrecks any room where it is found. Monza is the only possibility in radiators. Even the Gay Mother’s got them. Bruce MacBain, my personal architect, was too busy and Conor had to get someone else. The result: Stelrads. Also single layer of plasterboard for internal walls. Bruce always specifies two, with stuffing between.

I saw to that as well.

This morning, before Soho House,  I went to Westminster Abbey. I assumed that my life would pass without ever visiting this place on account of its being a common tourist destination. But Ed Jasper had the brilliant idea of a private verger-led tour. On arrival a bitter, grey person at the desk disclaimed all knowledge but Ed shrieked, ‘I’ve paid hundreds of pounds.’ The Abbey might not normally be a place where money talks but this time it was.

Twice we were ushered beyond ropes where ordinary members of the public are not admitted. At St Edward the Confessor’s Shrine we were prayerful and respectful and exclusive.

The big thing at the Abbey is tombs. Henry V was concerned to achieve maximum grandeur. He was the one with the awful hair and the bows and arrows. From the hair you wouldn’t have known he had this aspect.

On the whole I was rather against the Abbey. Gloomy, cluttered-up, self-appointed throbbing heart of the Nation, small fun, the whole place stuck in about 1386. Dust on the curly bits didn’t help. Poor Little Rich Gays somehow not welcome nor likely to welcome in turn. In the quire, Ed Jasper interrupted the verger. ‘There’s chewing gum under these seats!’ he squealed. Verger mortified.

Now, I must dash and get into training  and another outfit for this Ivy dinner.

Loathed Stelrad

Monday 1^st November 2010

Just as I recover from the assaults, direct and indirect, of Robert Nevil and the Gay Mother, it appears that Anthony Mottram, supposedly my oldest and closest friend, is in London for his birthday. No doubt I will be excluded from the celebrations.

Poor Little Rich Gays crumple and are crushed just like that. But we reassemble, we resume. Flattened by a passing car, we unpeel from the road, and bound on, like Jerry (of Tom and Jerry).

We live at a pitch of drama, fear and brilliance that would kill any normal person in seconds.

Yesterday the Multis went to lunch at London’s cheapest restaurant: the Lahore Kebab House. See graph below.

At 11.30.

They were hungry then so drove out from the penthouse without question.

The clocks going back had passed them by. The bizarre thing is they had the right time. I suppose all their devices had re-set themselves automatically. But their personal body clocks had carried on as before and so did they.

The Multis' Table at the Lahore Kebab House, London's Cheapest Restaurant - It's Bring Your Own. Where Are the Other Customers?

Friday 29^th October 2010

I crashed Maggi Hambling’s launch there. Robert Nevil, author of the famous History of the Pony Club, one of my oldest friends, was actually invited. She’s done a book about her Aldeburgh Scallop, which has caused such outrage, to her delight.

Well, you needn’t worry about the Ivy Club. It’s horrible. Honed white marble, sleek mirrors and glass, pink neon writing by Tracy Emin, then, to keep up the Ivy theme, the odd window with lead lights, a dab of oak panelling.

It’s not even mad.

Robert Nevil was busy with his brainy book friends. ‘Do you know Adrian Edge?’ he said. ‘He writes a blog.’ They all looked rather cross, the way book people do. ‘It’s quite good. Uneven, of course.’ They all say this. Everything’s uneven or twenty minutes too long, if a play or film.

Naughty, gleeful Robert Nevil was actually pawing the ground and his tail was whisking.   He’s turning into a bad pony who would surely get the better of any pony behaviour expert, even if from Harley Street.

My mirror crashed straight out of its frame.

I forgot to mention that last week in York the Gay Mother revived the hair transplant story. In the 60s, when I was a kitchen (or child), an appallingly greasy individual in a very brown mackintosh appeared in our garden one evening. He was from a hair transplant empire. I’d seen an ad in the newspaper and thought it would be perfect for the gay father. He could have had that dolly-head look.  But it was just supposed to be a brochure, not a visit.

The way the Gay Mother’s going on, if called upon to deliver my funeral oration, this episode will be the central feature.

The salesman told the Gay Mother that it was usually daughters they heard from.

Excruciating. Even now.

Still, at least, I was showing early signs of ordering and shopping which is good.

I am led to wonder why it is that confidence is ever granted. With all the criticism, failure and Poor Little Rich Gay perfectionism, the natural and rational state of being is near-destroyed. Any brighter mood is simply forgetting.

Anyway, I have never much cared for confidence, as a quality. Where it persists it is a pestilence.

Now, one rather thrilling thing that happened was that Yolanda Sonnabend, born 1935, leading theatre designer, liked my black suit by Nicolo Ceschi Berrini, the one I’ve been worried was too small and short in the jacket.

So, despite the above, as Maria said in The Sound of Music, when God closes a door, he opens a window somewhere else.

Also, tip for ladies in the evening –  important indoor coats were being worn this season. See graphs below.

Gleaming Ivy Club Glass Lift

Nooky Cotty Corner of Ivy Club, Clashing with Modern Decor Elsewhere

Important Evening Coat as Being Worn this Season, Dimly Seen. The Stripes are Wrong with Though

Important This Season Zebra Indoor Coat - Seen Through a Glass Darkly

This Season Indoor Coat Again - Dimly Seen

Ivy Club: View from Lift. Horror

Ivy Club - View from Lift. Not Nice