Wednesday 8^th September 2010

Today is the birthday of my architect and architect to Poor Little Rich Gays here and throughout the world, Bruce McBain. Yesterday was the birthday of Fergus Strachan who is celebrating by having his fibroblasts activated.

But neither are landmark birthdays.

Landmark birthdays throb at the core of Poor Little Rich Gay life. The Multis commanded  entire restaurants for their  40^th birthdays, Smallmeal had 150 to dinner at Massivebury for his.

Last week I dined with Ed Jasper, the bed linen expert, whose home is a gleaming millionaire background for his filthy talk. The other guests were high – newspaper world, gossip, inside stories – just what Poor Little Rich Gays like. Mandelbaum has got a small one. Gordon Brown is having a nervous breakdown.

One couple present had been, in June, to the 50^th birthday party of a Poor Little Rich Gay financier as follows: party of twenty-five flown by private jet to villa on Lake Como for week-long celebrations, on the actual day by helicopter to the Cip at Venice (you know the Cip, of course) for the birthday lunch, otherwise each evening fancy dress, the theme different countries. For Australia this couple were Kath and Kim (it’s on TV), which provoked a jet of pure filth from Ed about Kath’s battle with unwanted body hair, in the buttock region as far as I could tell. On Italy night, these two had no costume. They removed their clothes to reveal underwear composed of the Italian flag. Below this, once slipped out of, they displayed the Italian flag on their bare bottoms.

Ed couldn’t get over the idea of them drawing on and colouring each other in in this region.

Monday 6th September 2010

You won’t believe it!

Val came round today to do that chair cover. He’s de-bottled.

It’s been pending since January. Such perfection is sought that the thought alone of the work commands immediate re-bottling or resumption of  uninterrupted alcohol consumption.

But this morning Val arrived in triumph with his silken pieces cut, piped, bumped and sewn to perfection to fit over the harsh turquoise rep chosen by the Gay Grandmother in 1975 to cover the parts of an armchair that her mother hadn’t been arsed to do needlework for in 1930. That’s rubbish of course. The Gay Great Gran was wagnerienne and would have been a concert pianist had she not lost the top of a finger (her own) in a mangle. She followed Tristan with a score at the Garden. Her son was a famous actor with a mistress. In girlhood she saw Brahms.

‘I’m going to put on a day-time tiara,’ Val said. It is a phrase of Peter York’s to name a head-band to free the face of hair for work. After lunch, Googling: ‘Who was Clarrie Grundy’s father? Was it Jethro Larkin? When did he die? Did Flaubert write The Sentimental Education?’  Meals with Val always require a reference library. Yesterday he made a marquis au chocolat, recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Choc, butter, eggs, expresso coffee, tiny amount of flour. We recalled that in youth Anthony Mottram (my now estranged best friend from schooldays) and I devoted many hours to imagining the shortest conceivable pastry: 1lb butter, a teaspoon flour and so on. Mottram had a mania for making Gateau St Honore at one time, the most complicated patisserie ever attempted in a home kitchen.

Val set himself the task of summing up the plot of Madame Bovary in a sentence: ‘Idiotic woman ruined by her upholsterer.’  But I think doctors come into it somehow. All afternoon Val upholstered, stitching on the silk pieces over the rep to give new life to G-ma’s tapestry of 80 years ago. Twice blood was drawn, once staining but Val got it off with spit, leaving a tiny watermark. ‘Never mind,’ I said, ‘it must bear the wounds of its making.

Well, actually the fine phrase came to me later.

Val's Sublime Upholstery - In Progress

Val's Sublime Upholstery - A Finished Part

Thursday 2nd September 2010

The Gay Mother, 86, doesn’t like her dahlias – or some of them. ‘The size of dinner plates,’ she says. Bought by accident locally. Not ordered from a specialist nursery. ‘What could I have been thinking! I ought to know what “large-flowered, double” means.’

She’s despondent about her garden generally. The deer have sat on it, or eaten it; the late annuals have hardly grown for lack of warmth. But really it’s marvellous and the colours much better than in a well-known nearby hortus (that’s Latin for garden, because I didn’t want to put ‘garden’ again)  done by a jumped-up professional.

You just can’t have orange and crimson and a terrible sort of chemical electric pink together – with pale blue agapanthus for punctuation  – and conifers!

I forgot to tell you that in July when I was with her, the Gay Mother appeared in my bedroom first thing saying, ‘I know there’s a recipe in Jane Grigson for a blackcurrant sauce to have with duck. But I can’t find it.’  She’d been up since six. Her blackcurrant bushes were at that time abundant. She was determined to range beyond puree. We found the Grigson sauce, jettisoned her cassis and vinegar (ugh!) and put red wine. It was a success.

Gay Mothers are where it all started. They are to be followed as well as outdone. As in the matter of the crusts – see graph below

The Gay Mother's Dinner Plate Dahlias

Dinner Plate Dahlias in the Gay Mother's Garden. See Normal Size Next To..

These Colours Together in Well-Known Nearby Garden

Chemical Electric Pink Dahlia in Nearby Well-known Garden

The Gay Mother's Aga-done Rusk-Crust - a Drinks' Time Snack Suggestion

Monday 30^th August 2010

As I was saying, Poor Little Rich Gays are difficult. Six in a villa and you can bank on smoke curling from the windows before long, followed by fat juicy flames.

Unless you adopt the silent lethal approach of  Robin Smallmeal, who could quell even the most monstrous of Poor Little Rich Gays (see previous post).

So how monstrous were we in Umbria? Did we prance and glance and arse? Were the contents of the fridge hurled?

Or were we calm and, awful thought, well-adjusted?  Surely Arjan Bose could do no harm. The bonsai doctor (the metaphor here refers to his exquisite size) from Calcutta, friend of Robert Nevil’s,  when asking for more had the winning ways of a very small boy indeed.  I’m sure it was nothing that once or twice he imperiously summoned Robert Nevil downstairs for some kind of private confab. Robert Nevil himself became just a little unstable at the lack of sourdough bread for his melted fennel crostini – but can you blame him? You can’t get reckless with the Summer 2010 Poor Little Rich Gay signature dish, equally successful in France and in Italy. Then there was the bundle of dandelions bought by me from the supermarket.  I offered a sample. I caught him pulling faces. Fortunately, with sublime patience, I forbore from sautéing the rest.

Marcus Cargill, England’s leading clock restorer, took against the Sangrantino grape which the Multis were promoting in their wine purchases and Prince Dmitri thought I ought to be cooking pasta in a bigger pan. This was after he had threatened to boil underwear at 60 centigrade (I do know that 60 centigrade is not boiling: it’s just a manner of speaking).

We sailed through all that, me nailed graciously to the Cross. Then the Blond Multi seized the plate of Parma ham I had placed on the table and returned it to the kitchen for re-styling. He wanted all the wrapping from the shop and the plastic separating the layers removed. I remained saintly and swerved from a scene. Years ago I would have plummeted to make-do-and-mend from high grandeur as only Poor Little Rich Gays can when determined to have their way: ‘If it’s not all eaten it’ll have to be re-wrapped. What a waste of cling-film and time and energy!’ More dangerous was the affair of the cheese. The Multis bought an antique Taleggio. What wasn’t eaten was wrapped up and put in the fridge. Or was it? Why did it keep being found not in the fridge? Eventually the truth emerged. The Multis wanted it styled on a board and left out in the open. I felt a terrible buzzing in my head. Flies! Hygiene! The Photographer Multi was getting annoyed. ‘That’s how I want it,’ he said. ‘We bought it,’ he said reasonably. There was a danger of my becoming unanchored from the Cross, a terrible force of evil. Prince Dmitri had to intervene. Catastrophe was avoided. Later there was a tender making-up.

Does this mean Poor Little Rich Gays are getting better or worse?

The Antique Taleggio Which Nearly Caused a Scene

Friday 27th August 2010

You’re dying to know how we all got on in the Umbrian villa.

Poor Little Rich Gays are clever, driven (how else did they get all that money?), off their heads, brave, competitive, superb, absolutist, fractured, valiant, silly, enduring –  surely more than one in a holiday villa and crisis is inevitable.

A writer friend of Robert Nevil’s, on being told there would be several hire cars at my and Prince Dmitri’s Umbrian villa, said: ‘Good for rows,’ meaning a person could get away.

In 1994, at Il Poggino, near Siena,  there was the fearsome risotto gun-boat incident when Bruce McBain, my architect, challenged the approach to stirring of Rufus Pitman, the novelist and critic. Further back, in 1974, I beat Anthony Mottram about the head when he failed to get a door open quickly enough. That was in Greece, but before we really were Poor Little Rich Gays, so maybe doesn’t count.

A possible solution to the problem of villa hiss and scratch is offered by  Robin Smallmeal, former friend, head of landfill in this country or whatever, £450,000 a year but an employee.

Do try this yourself.

The object is to achieve total power, so there are no scenes. But this is not granted only by paying for everything, although this is the vital first step.  In addition, you should appear on superficial acquaintance, as Smallmeal does, just about the most inadequate and uneasy person anyone is ever likely to meet. Then nobody will notice your steely brooding exercise of control. Indeed they might even feel sorry for you. Your strange silent  potency is made absolute by doing absolutely nothing, expressing few preferences, going nowhere, saying little, taking an interest in even less and lying a great deal on a chaise longue.

This way you will have even the most volatile and superior of Poor Little Rich Gays fetching and carrying, their chins scraping the ground with obligation.

The only drawback with this method is that it is the equivalent of death and will lead inevitably, as in my case, to the sudden brutal termination of friendship.

But you may prefer it this way.

Come back later for what really happened in Umbria.

Watch out for Those Scissors !

Wednesday 25th August 2010

We’ve been thinking about busts. The Multis have one of Mrs Thatcher in their Tuscan villa where they are lodged as we speak.

Go and seek them out!

Robert Nevil recalls my own rendition of Her Late Majesty Queen Mary, executed at Barrowborough 34 years ago, where I was at school with Anthony Mottram, from whom I am currently estranged.

I think it now  turns out also to be Mrs Thatcher.

I spent hours on that hair.

Her Late Majesty Queen Mary, by me, Adrian Edge, Aged 14

Tuesday 24^th August 2010

£400 on swimming trunks – but as Troy Banner of the New York Poor Little Rich Gays said: ‘Well, it’s a whole outfit.’

At the Umbrian villa we lunched on the small balcony to get the beauty of the view. Never before has so much wealth been crammed into such a tiny corner.

Even so, on holiday, in the sun, poolside, the temptation is there. Far from home, far from the capital of our great nation, no-one is looking – will we slide? Will we fail to resist?

Will we let go?

Frockage-wise, I mean.

In youth I vowed never, never to let go. Never let go and age at least will not run wild. Never let go and you’ll always be new, even if actually old, and finished, with face and hair, and the will applied to clothes. Think of Nicky Haslam in his rock-mod phase.

If you let go for one moment, you could unravel at once. Especially as you get older. You could never regain your grip.

But the temptation is great, especially half way up a mountain in Umbria at the end of a 3 kilometre dirt track. I’m afraid we succumbed. I continued to use one of my Turkish post-swimming wraps although I knew it had a stain. I did not change in the evening. Super-Dry, a new youth label of massive wham, I’m told, was worn by both the Blond Multi and Marcus Cargill, England’s leading clock restorer, but they both repeated their pieces. Wore them more than once.

Some favoured holiday frockage is letting go in itself. Shorts!  I can’t bear them. Absolute horror in any circs. Why are they always old? And holiday footwear such a problem – sandals, flip-flops: they’re saying nothing.

On the other hand Arjan Bose, Robert Nevil and the Photographer Multi were unfailingly styled and intended, even though the PM was in shorts in the daytime, but he reinvented them. Arjan and Robert offered exquisite, slender prints and linens in shades of puce, mauve and ‘Queen’ from the Calcutta bazaar. In the evenings, both the Multis were transformed into exquisite night-moths in a range of whisper pink and white  suits, the PM with winking diamond cuff-links.

And the Photographer Multi has surely, surely solved the summer holiday footwear problem – see graph below.

Time for tips. Come and get your tips!

• Swimwear: trunks please, not those awful swimming shorts. One plain pair for daytime, for evening, ‘celebration’ trunks with dense pattern,min cost £100
• Footwear: see graph below. Those ‘seagull skin’ slip-ons are by Jeffrey West. No sandals or flip-flops
• Shorts: burn them.
• Sarongs, Turkish bath wraps: have at least three. Wear as skirt poolside or in the villa except in the evening
• Do not repeat tops or shirts
• Change in the evening: summer suits in pink or white or long-sleeved shirts and good slacks, no jeans, whatever the heat or rurality of location. Jewellery.

Important 'Super Dry' Piece Worn by the Blond Multi

Important 'Super Dry' Piece Worn by Marcus Cargill

The Photographer Multi's Excellent Summer Holiday Footwear Solution

Monday 23^rd August 2010

The Type One and Type Two Poor Little Rich Gay holiday are blending perfectly in Italy. My lowly craving for Muriel Spark’s grave  has been fulfilled while the Multis, that fabulous property- and company-owning pair, have moved to a self-funded ten-bedroom Tuscan villa furnished with breakfast service, English mustard for the Blond Multi and a bust of their adored Mrs Thatcher –  the Villa Thatcheriana. Their guests tend to Socialism: Lady Newell, the indomitable, mahogany-voiced 81-year-old author and former Lib Dem candidate; her daughter, Elsa Hodgeman, the Gertrude Stein de nos jours, the great enabler and friend of all our top artists, including Beatrice Chanting and Arnie Beringer. Also staying (politics unknown) are Carol Earle, curator of an important New York museum (you’ll have heard of it), and Philip Carlton-Grover, huge in British publishing, his wife, Genevieve, an important beauty, former model and heiress, and their young adult children, one of whom a coming male model.

Last week the darling Blond Multi (if you could but see his blue eyes) said, re: my posting ‘The Multis in Umbria’, ‘Thank you for making us so much more interesting than we actually are.’

Oh yes, Poor Little Rich Gays are modest, not to say vulnerable – unlike the glazed, bleach-toothed Earls Court Gays. Though even they, when you scrape the enamel, are more than  they seem.

All tend, in the end, to Poor Little Rich Gay.

That glorious state.

Meantime, I pursued my less monied Type 2 activities. It was a boiling afternoon for Muriel Spark’s grave and I couldn’t find it. I was up and down the hill to the little village, where Google located it, in the wire hire car, not liking to ask the only lurkers, all ancient, the way to the cemetery; anyway had got the word wrong in Italian but eventually shown by toothless old man who said his parents were buried there and he too in time would join. Muriel under an awfully final, relentless but somehow massively present grey slab in high-walled cemetery, grim, stony, flowerless, full death-theme maintained, not a living thing there, yet a safe little corner for the dead and the immemorial Tuscan olive groves whispering from the other side of the wall.

I haven’t time to tell you about my other quest, for the egg-veg pudding, the sformato, the Platonic ideal of which was experienced by me with the Gay Mother at Balducci’s in Florence in ’94.

And never quite regained, either in subsequent restaurants or the home.

Bust of Mrs Thatcher at the Multis' Tuscan Villa

The Multis' Tuscan Villa - Night-time

The Blond Multi at his new Tuscan Villa - Still on Non-Mandelbaum Autobiog Book

Muriel's Grand Grey Grave

19^th August 2010

Bumping up the three kilometre dirt road to our Umbrian villa in our little wire hire car (the Multis have rented a BMW 1 Series convertible, which bashes over the craters, the Photo Multi at the wheel), Marcus Coleman, England’s leading clock restorer, burst into song. Once he was a chorister at one of England’s top cathedrals (Poor Little Rich Gays are always at the centre of things) along with my oldest, currently non-speakers, friend, Anthony Mottram, and Ned Boule, the famous alternative organist (Poor Little Rich Gays always know each other even if they don’t know it). Marcus still sings Boy Soprano, very loud and superb, with some top notes missing. It was Stanford in G.

Later, in the villa, he played a CD of the Magnificat in different versions. We noticed the words: ‘the rich shall be sent empty away.’

Oh dear. Where does that leave us?

Not that we are rich, of course, or at least not enough.

And what would Prince Dmitri, also at the villa, who threatened to veer from true Poor Little Rich Gay and  boil underwear at 60 centigrade and who goes to Mass on Sunday, what would he think?

Then yesterday morning the Blond Multi texted from the Multi bedroom at 7.28: ‘How about Assisi?’

Well, why not? We roared off in the convertible.

The Multis were entranced. Pored over the Giottos. All 32 of them or whatever. Did you know there were Giottos at Assisi? Do you know who Giotto was? Or is?

It’s the life of St Francis.

‘I love that one with the birds,’ the Blond Multi said several times. ‘We’re getting so much out of this,’ they both said. ‘It’s the earliest collage,’ the Photo Multi said. He was right. St Francis’s halo in each fresco is actually appliqué and raised from the surface. I’d never noticed that before.

St Francis went on after death, you know.  I mentioned it to the Blond Multi: ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘ by at least 12  frescoes’.

‘Let’s have a last look at the birds before we go,’ they both said.

St Francis and the Birds, Loved by the Multis at Assisi

Wednesday 18^th August 2010

I’m at the villa. Prince Dmitri Hersov is in the kitchen with some wild boar chunks for this evening.

With Prince Dmitri, I’ve taken a house with pool in Umbria. We’re having guests here, among them the Multis, that fabulous property- and company-owning tycoon couple.

You should try it – taking a villa for your friends with pool. It’s quite easy, even with no money. I’ll be explaining the economics in a posting soon.

The Multis arrived on Saturday and within ten minutes had routed out the best food shop and bought an entire aged taleggio. If you’ve never known the Multis, their glamour and extraordinariness, the Blond Multi tired from millionaire-ing in London but ravishing, the Photographer Multi, stunning and full of glee. ‘Ah, yes, Assisi,’ he said. ‘That was put on the map by Mrs Thatcher’…

He referred to the incident of the prayer of St Francis being spoken on the doorstep of Number 10 in 1979.

The Multis surge into a neighbourhood and press it to their bosom. It is never the same again. The long, intricate conversations in shops and wineries, the language barrier knocked quite down, not by any speaking of the language in question; the new and intriguing paths providers are encouraged to take, perhaps their entire business model re-thought for them, the unheard-of purchasing – none of this will be forgotten.  The Multis are tremendous – gregarious, lavish with their attentions to others and their showing of themselves, even anxious that they have not done enough.

For Umbertide, the local town, the Photographer Multi wore a radical interpretation of the colonial look – khaki shorts, mauve jacket and shirt, mauve socks and splodgy two-tone clucks by Jeffrey West. Yesterday we took a steamer to Isola Maggiore in Lake Trasimeno (no 1^st class). Thirty seconds after landing he had bought a brilliant orange sequined ten-gallon hat.

You too should aim for this impact when you travel.

On a budget, with will, it can be achieved.

The Photographer Multi's Umbertide Ensemble

The Photographer Multis's Clucks for Umbertide

The Photographer Multi's Orange Sequined Hat

The Blond Multi in the Pool - Not the Mandelbaum Autobiog Which He Has