Sunday 23^rd May 2010

I’m in Bath, which, if you don’t know, is a very nice small Georgian town in England’s west only lived in by nice people.

I’m with hets. It is a relief. This sudden onslaught of hot weather has brought on a wardrobe crisis. I was taken by surprise. Summer clothes not ready, not de-bagged, ironed, or even bought. As you know, I’m dead against rushing into summer clothes the first fine day in April but 24 hours’ warning at least would have been helpful, which is the time is takes to bag up winter frockage (which should be put away clean of course, otherwise moths…..) and bring out the summer.

But with hets, no need to worry about clothes.

Now I must dash back to London and the thrills and torment of Poor Little Rich Gay life. Chelsea Flower Show on Wednesday: Frankie-Doreen Gunn, Aunt Lavinia and Pavel Marincek, boyfriend of Anthony Mottram 1996 to 2003, keen gardener, coming over from Prague. Tonight I dine at the centre of things, with a nightmare television personality involved in coverage of the show.

But refreshed after this heterosexual interlude. I was stranded in the downstairs shower without my conditioner. There was nothing to hand but a range of Adidas washing items. Their dishwasher hasn’t been draining properly so we’ve been wrenching to get it out from under the worksurface. Then, I , Adrian Edge, was stationed out of doors by the waste pipe to check the flow. It was like the time at Massivebury when the kitchen outlet got blocked with carrot peelings. Smallmeal, head of land-fill in this country (ought to have known better) or whatever, was ready to send for a team of specialists on a Sunday. I went outside and pulled all the carrot out of the end of the pipe where it came out of the wall of Massivebury. Smallmeal and his partner, Limpney, would never have thought of anything so ungrand. It is said they employ someone to change their lightbulbs.

Poor Little Rich Gays can choose a completely non-DIY path but the effect of a really grand queen unblocking a drain might be spectacular. Poorer Poor Little Rich Gays nip up step-ladders etc when nobody is looking.

I’ve also been, while in Bath, to a garden centre. This was unnecessary. I did try to get my het friends to take an interest in some rare plants only available in Colchester – not that far to go surely. Only a day’s drive. But they wanted trailing petunias.

Thursday 20th May 2010

It all started last Thursday, this tugging undertow I keep on mentioning. Since then, by bizarre coincidence or not, other things have happened which tug too, in a similar way.

Poor Little Rich Gays are really rather driven, you see. Have you heard of W.H.Auden?  He was a poet. He wrote a poem on the death of Yeats, who was another poet. It goes: ‘Mad Ireland hurt him into Poetry.’

Well, something has hurt Poor Little Rich Gays into being Poor Little Rich. They’ve been hounded, gashed, crushed into greatness.

But we wouldn’t have it any other way. Warped, maimed but outstanding to be preferred any day over steady, reliable and happy. Do try it if you are a normal gay or straight. Do become Poor Little Rich.

Even if there’s a price to pay.

First of all, I heard of a long-established couple barely on speaking terms ever since some silly woman asked them if they were forming a Civil Partnership: ‘I couldn’t marry anyone who actually likes Emma Bridgewater pottery.’ The one who said this was trying to be deflecting and flippant.

Civil Partnership?  All very well as a business arrangement. But why not be married to several people or on a rotating basis? You can be married but not having sex or even living together. Did you know that? You can be married without ever having had sex, in fact.  This couple have been bickering away and occasionally trying to strangle each other for twenty years. Why not carry on? Why let the horrible spectre of Civil Partnership intrude?  Were it not for Civil Partnership, would Anthony Mottram and I have fallen out? Wouldn’t we still be nagging away at each other and trotting off on happy holidays as a threesome, the third being Vladimir Alexov, Mottram’s boyfriend, blessed with only 24 years?

Then, last Thursday, Angus Willis phoned up, from the top of his game as a food writer and photographer. Just finished photographing pizzas for M & S, to be used on packaging. But feeling low, troubled by Poor Little Rich Gay life, also thinking of forming a Civil with Fergus Strachan after twenty-two years together. I go round and he makes consoling pizza with the M & S ingredients of which he’s got several tons. We fall to recalling our days at Prep and Public, which are boarding schools whence, if you were English and middle class, it was  normal, in the 60s and 70s, to be sent at the age of seven. It occurs to me how many Poor Little Rich Gays are Prep and Public, hence perhaps fiercely independent, bitches for achievement above all else, but wounded, not really right at all. Plus being gay and rich, of course.

We agree that going back for the second term of Prep was the worst. When you knew…. Starting was just bewildering. After Christmas 1965, I took my little tent into the woods, an outdoor mode in winter being preferable to that awful school. But I only got as far as a bit beyond the Titballs’ (yes, they really were called that) chicken shed and the poor gay mother came to fetch me back in her Jaeger coat. So much suffering all round. Angus said that his father wept putting him on the plane from Germany. What did they think they were doing?

Finally on Sunday, Lord Arrowby murmurs in my ear after the lunch. We’d been talking about how he’d been Head Boy of his Prep earlier. Anyway, can’t bear running the country. Wants to live in an ashram in India. Well, he couldn’t, of course. One of the things he seems to deal with is the aging population. He couldn’t just abandon them or it. Must be a temporary set-back. Exhausted after the election and those shattering days before the coalition formed.

All the same, telling, don’t you think?

There you are! The Poor Little Rich Gays

Wednesday 19^th May 2010

As I was saying, before the reviving diversion of Val’s birthday yesterday, there are rumblings deep at the back of the cave. Poor Little Rich Gays are riven. Or some of them are . So many are prep and public you know, on top of everything else. That means boarding school, all boys, from age of 7 or 8, if you’re in US or foreign. And they have to be at the top or, failing that, in the know. As for relationships, is there really time to fit them in, with all this achieving to be done? Those that are fitted in are not quite what they seem. Others are fitted in that shouldn’t be.

The great exception: Rufus Pitman and Raj Zoroaster, our number one couple. They celebrated one year of prosperous marriage on Sunday for which we had the lunch at Coriander. But even they live in different countries. They’re always jetting between. There’s no married home, to be exhibited in Hello!, no linen cupboard, no married dinner service for best.

But we wouldn’t have it any other way. Not for us the full normal life. If you’re straight or a normal gay, thinking of becoming poor little rich, don’t be put off.

On Saturday, the Blond Multi bounded straight downstairs to the kitchen where Robert Nevil was chopping. They’d not seen each other for a long time.

I don’t think I’ve ever explained that it was RN and his partner, Sebastian Archer, now usually absent abroad, who discovered the Multis in their pre-Multi form, back in the 90s, when RN and SA were living in Walthumbria (yes, they really were, Walthamstow!)  For a time, not a day went by without the pre-multi BMW whirling by, the Photographer pre-Multi ferociously at the wheel, and the other three thrilling in the back or beside.

What outings and consumption of estate agents’ details! Leading, as the Photographer Multi recalled, to the exodus from Walthumbria and elevation to the present Regency semi where SA and RN live (more about that another day. It is of course an exceptional res).

Robert Nevil and the Blond Pre-Multi were very thick, the Blond being an astonishing Brideshead reincarnation in looks, hair and frockage. They spent many a happy afternoon in Robin Smallmeal’s kitchen preparing dinner while Sebastian Archer and the Photographer Multi played cards. Every time these last went to unloved opera in Frankfurt or wherever with Smallmeal, the Blond and Robert Nevil enjoyed the cinema, followed by the Lahore Kebab House.

So this dinner was a reunion. The Photographer Multi was in glittering, brilliant form with his epic photograph of sheep on the Robert Nevil family farm behind him. The Blond Multi was at the other end of the table, head in papers with Robert Nevil. I was dimly aware that he was grilling him about Mottram. I just hope RN didn’t let out the big secret.

Maybe he did which is why he went into the kitchen and chopped off his finger. Or sliced into the top quite deep. Arjan Bose had to tend, he being doctor,with me in nurse role. RN was returned to the dining room with fabulous Causality-style dressing which later fell off.

I’ve not heard anything of Mottram since that dinner about a month ago.

Then it was on, the next day, to the Rufus Pitman/Raj Zoroaster celebration lunch. Civil Partnership perfect for them, for others trouble, as we shall see, not in ways you might expect. Harry Rollo, the impresario and performance artist, arrived and removed his trousers.  He and Rufus recalled that they’d collaborated on a ‘performance’ in Germany. When the director gave them bottles of self-made perfume, they both automatically executed ‘Poppers’ stiffs.

Have you heard of Poppers?

The fume wasn’t awfully nice.

Most of the other guests were clients of Bruce MacBain, who was present. Lord Arrowby looked pale and a little glassy, but still beautiful. He went out to a shop and came back with a Sure Deodorant stick. An odd purchase for the middle of lunch. I still don’t know whether it was for use or just to illustrate his theory that it was really a starter sex toy. I said to the stern Scottish lady sitting next to me: ‘I adore Lord Arrowby.’ ‘You should make that less obvious. Play hard to get.’

It wouldn’t be any use. He’d take even less notice of me or none at all. But, in a way, I am playing hard to get. Besides, outside in the street, afterwards, he became confidential.

Tuesday 18th May 2010

Just back.Val’s Birthday completed. He showed, not re-bottled, and, it turned out, had made pastry.

The exhibition at Lambeth Palace wasn’t copes. It was books.  Numerous grey woolly heads bending over glass cases in the library there, apparently listening to telephones – actually audio-guides. I thought: ‘an interest in ecclesiastical affairs which is often a prelude to insanity.’ That’s Decline and Fall by E. Waugh. But it was fascinating, if tiny things to look at: Queen Elizabeth’s prayer book, coloured in, pictures of herself at prayer, gospels illuminated by Eric Gill, document authorising the building of St Paul’s Cathedral and so on.

We nipped round to the Museum of Garden History for Christopher Lloyd exhib. He was an important gardener, if you don’t know. But this strictly for devotees only. His old shoes, Letts Engagement Diaries, father’s spade, notes scribbled on the back of packaging to his minions; highlight was substantial display of ancient, profoundly inedible bottled fruit with corroded lids.

Val said: ‘It’s the Museum of Catering and Commerce in Budapest all over again.’ Absolutely Val’s favourite on visits to Anthony Mottram in the early 90s, before he, Mottram, moved to Prague. Intoxicating display of saucepans and colanders. That put us in mind of the Museum of Paprika at Szeged that never was. Or never found by us despite full effort. ‘There is no museum of Paprika on the road to Szeged,’ Val proclaimed. ‘What am I echoing?’ I was blank. ‘Jewel’s Crown! You must remember. Edwina Crane, Barbie’s friend at the Mission. The one who dressed as a Hindu and self-immolated in her garden shed. She said: ‘There is no God upon the road to Dibrapur.’

But it’s before your day, isn’t it? Jewel in the Crown. Massive TV drama, about 1981. Never seen the like since.

We took an overland train to Val’s flat. He’s been upholstering, using Swedish tablecloths; he’s removed the ostrich egg lampshade from its fluted, curlicued and self-gilded stand and replaced it with something more ordinary that gives better light. Nearby is the immaculate box-shaped shade he made himself from a silk scarf I bought back for him from Zimbawe. We had an elegant early supper. Val had attempted shortcrust, for the first time in fifteen years, and triumphed. It was a baked cheesecake, superbly precise and French, as is all Val’s patisserie. He hasn’t lost his pastry hands. For lunch on Sunday, he told me,  he made a cauliflower salad, not the Antioch version though but the Balkan.

So Val is glorious. Next week, it’s possible he might be moved to come over to me and finish re-covering that chair, which last had a fitting in January.

For a while I forgot my under-tow.

But we’ll come to that tomorrow.

Christopher Lloyd's Old Bottled Fruit

Christopher Lloyd's Shoes

Gas Fog Horn Used by Christopher Lloyd When Immobile in Old Age to Attract Attention

Tuesday 18th May 2010

I’m dashing because Val, if not re-bottled, is coming up to Lambeth Palace and we’re looking at Treasures but I’m relishing the Christopher Lloyd exhib next door in the Museum of Garden History rather more.

Suspicious of Treasures – will it be copes?

Today is Val’s 53rd birthday. What a triumph of a kind, rising and rising through shards of broken glass – not to mention broken bones, acquired while ‘unsteady’. The latest to go is the collar bone, but hardly any pain.

I’ve got my undertow. I mentioned it before. But I’m not quite getting to it yet because on Saturday Robert Nevil had a dinner for the Multis, Prince Dmitri Hersov and Arjan Bose, then on Sunday it was the first wedding anniversary of Rufus Pitman, the novelist and critic, and Raj Zoroaster, so lunch at Coriander, which is a lovely holiday for Poor Little Rich Gays from the Ivy and Arbutus, a simple place in Kennington Lane, near the Royal Vauxhall Tavern.

But in a way my undertow comes in. Civil Partnership ( although of course bliss for Rufus and Raj),  high achievement, multi-dimensional gay relationships!  If you but knew the goings-on. ..This volcano in Iceland is as nothing…

That’s it for today. I must rush for the Palace. I planned more, but my theme’s too complex, my material too delicate.

It must wait.

Sunday 16th May 2010

There’s so much to tell and there’s an undertow I can’t bring out yet. Poor Little Rich Gays are almost crushed under the weight of their own greatness and multiplying engagements.Poor Lord Arrowby is very pale and Angus Willis, the internationally-known food writer  – his fridge is jam-packed with M&S pizza dough.

But it’ll have to wait because:

On Friday, Frankie-Doreen Gunn and Giles Ullerston achieved the pinnacle of Poor Little Rich Gay life, although themselves only peripherally Poor Little Rich Gay, being actually straight and with off-spring. They gave a HOME CONCERT. A concert in the home. Of course it means, large entertaining area and grand piano. Actually they had a string quartet with added clarinet for one piece. Terribly top people, awfully good. Audience all classical music enthusiasts, only a few household names (usually at Frankie-Doreen and Giles’ everyone is a household name) , and Laura Malcolm, who became chilly after the Mendelssohn and was fetched a stunning shawl from Calcutta by Arjan Bose, the exquisite little spryte friend of Robert Nevil’s, currently doctoring at the clap clinic (but bored with it now) who lodges in Frankie-Doreen and Giles’ basement flat.

After the music there was a buffet on the ground floor, the concert having taken place below in, as it happens, a  Bruce MacBain-designed space. Oh yes, it all links together. Frankie-Doreen and Giles do not suffer from gay nerves. The previous night  they had given a huge drinks party for a business venture and strode straight on to a home concert with buffet, wines, seating, upheaval,  for 50 the following night. Frankie-Doreen holds down several jobs all of which involve reading 600 page documents in forty minutes then pledging £600,000 while keeping an eye on the pastry base she is pre-cooking in her mercifully eye-level oven.

What she would do without that eye-level…! The whole thing could come crashing down…

Arjan and I went back downstairs with our plates, because there was somewhere to sit, not joined by any of the others – the only gays in the village. We picked over our mutual frockage in great detail and found Topshop elements. Later we heaved upstairs. The only serious conversation I had was with a woman incidently shown in a very bad light in one of Laura Malcolm’s novels (didn’t help with the carrots). She admired my shoes, which were Prada from the Jan sale and I admired hers. She was worried though about her tangerine panels  and had thought of colouring them in different. She and Laura now on very good terms, probably better than before the affair of the novel.

Frankie-Doreen and Giles only need make a few adjustments to achieve a truly Poor Little Rich Gay home concert, should they ever venture again. I went to one once, in South Kensington, at the res of one Robert Venables QC. Now he’s got an organ in the library. A huge great built thing occupying the whole of one wall. He had someone famous and expensive in to thunder away on it. That’s of no matter. The crucial thing is the audience – it  was at least 25 per cent possibly diplomatic wife, foreign and bewildered, no idea why they were there, with pashminas, short skirts, lippie and jewellery, well-practiced in sitting bolt upright and keeping the mind empty while concert in progress. The other 75 per cent was an array of queenaria who would never knowingly self-book such a performance.

Wednesday 12^th May 2010

I was mystified by this tea when the invitation came since Hardy Amies, leading British couturier of the post-War era who frocked the Queen, has been dead for some years. It turned out there is an exhibition at the Savile Row Salon of relics – letters from HM (at that precise moment about to be besieged by Prime Ministers, inconveniently, at the dinner hour)  and Princess Michael of Kent (‘Thank you so much for making me look so good in 1978’), fur trimmings from some of the Queen Mother’s duster coats, Sir Hardy’s medals, his invitations to Downing Street etc. Lionel Moore, TV producer of very famous drama serial in the 80s (wistful, melancholy, Larry in it), now 89, present and peering, said: ‘I threw away my invitation to Princess Diana’s funeral. They’re for sale on E-bay for £500, you know.’

Other guests in the white, grey and gold first floor show room (purring carpet in a greyhound shade): Anneka Rice, dressed as a cow girl, badges all over her suede jacket; Freddie Fox, hatter to Her Majesty; Lady Selina Hastings, biographer of Willie, Lady Farringdon, and ….Pamela Powell, widow of  Enoch – old-lady nun’s shoes, but excellent coiffure.

Speaking of which, the ladies’ hair was astonishing. Grand whooshed-up do’s, the faintest hint of mauve, French roll at the back, such as are never seen nowadays. In fact ladies absolutely finished, in tailored jackets with bound edges and court shoes – apart from Pam Powell, who said she was in a tizzy re: political crisis.

Eric Vaughan, partner of Lionel Moore, encountered at the Patrick Proctor Show a few weeks ago, said to Anneka: ‘I saw you on TV the other day.’ ‘It must have been a repeat,’ she said. She was astonished at Eric and Lionel’s state of preservation; it is true. They are how we should be if spared for that age, although Eric insisted that Lionel was not safe with a teacup and as we were leaving made him take off his Hardy Amies overcoat and give it to a young man to try on. ‘If anyone’s going to ruin the look of a garment, it’s you,’ he announced. But Lionel said earlier, ‘Should I have a blog?’ when I told him about mine. I think he should. He fought and fought to save Brighton nude beach and now he’s working night and day for Chickenshed – it’s a theatre outfit.

We recalled Sir Hardy, and Willie, Lady Selina Hastings, biographer of, having been present. Lionel said he’d been lounging at Cap Ferrat when he was 24 and someone came by and invited him to the Villa Mauresque (do wake up; surely you know the Villa Maur was home of Willie Somerset Maugham, best-selling author of his day, rolling, rolling in lolly). But they said there would be Bridge after dinner and Lionel thought that would be boring and didn’t go. He only realised afterwards that he was being procured, not knowing Willie at all, just being a stray young man at the Cap – where I am going for dinner in a few weeks time.

That’s how it is in these circles – huge grandeur, precise little sandwiches, mini-scones with cream and jam styled on – and a swirling undercurrent of filth. Lionel told me a rude story about Sir Hardy shocking a country doctor which I’d better not repeat. I sat next to him once at Lionel and Eric’s. He said, ‘It’s perfectly astonishing. They’ve done all this themselves.’ He meant the dinner. His other topics were the terrible grammar of the young and the varying lavatory experiences of the very old. Robert Nevil would know a fancy word for it.

Princess Michael of Kent's Gown on Display at Hardy Amies

Another Gown at Hardy Amies

A Suit From Hardy Amies

Black Corner at Hardy Amies

Tuesday 11^th May 2010

Readers have called for an end to politics on this blog.

Do not worry. In an hour I leave for an afternoon function at 14 Savile Row in aid of the late Sir Hardy Amies (don’t ask).

All the same, two leading Poor Little Rich Gays, minimum, are in the thick of it. Anthony Mottram (not heard of by me for two weeks. Readers must await sensational developments) is ‘consulting’, his gruelling deadline the MPs return to the Commons House next week. The great Lord Arrowby, behind-the-scenes fixer in the highest corridors of power, actually telephoned me yesterday direct from the Nation’s throbbing heart. Can you imagine?  Having the time for such as me! Fearfully discreet, of course, as these non-aligned always are. Merely confirmed that yes, he is there, where history is being made, at the centre of things but, for the moment,  party members are running the show.

On the weekend, the Multis surged into Tory heartlands, targeting a Sunday luncheon venue in the constituency with the largest swing to Con of all. See graph below. I have heard no more about the Photographer Multi’s Mother’s 80th Birthday Dinner. No doubt I shall.

Elsewhere, Poor Little Rich Gays have resumed their proper pursuits. Peter Acharya has thrown away all his partner, Ned Czernowski’s, clothes prior to re-styling him. At work, he has also got hold of a compromising e-mail. In Hastings, Angus Willis, leading food writer and stylist, is having plaice with cabbage and carrots. He is also looking at ice-cream makers. Fergus Strachan, his partner and Lib Dem supporter, cannot be parted from his huge yellow rosette.

I have been cleaning, in the interim between my hired lady on Thursdays. I do hope the new government, whatever it is, will pass a law requiring cleaners to get into corners. Because they don’t. Let’s hope also that the new politics, if it is new, will mean an upward surge in politicians’ frockage. The Clegg weekend leisure wear (horrid baggy dark shirt) was very disappointing. Cameron has been wearing some interesting fine knits but all in navy and black.

Time to branch out and up.

Misty Luncheon Venue Where Swing to Tory was Largest Favoured by the Multis

Saturday 8th May 2010

Of course Lord Arrowby is absolutely throbbing at the centre of things.  We’re always there, Poor Little Rich Gays, at the centre of things, in some shape or form. That’s the whole point. Watch out for him on the TV, with better hair and skin than the others and lovely blue eyes. These behind-the-scenes Greatnesses are banging together the heads of the politicians, backed up by Her Majesty, possibly, until such time as they buck up and form a gov.

They are our only hope.

Do not think I am not afraid. Nobody likes to see falling markets. I have been trying to console myself with grooming-product thoughts. I really do think I will finally buy Dr Brandt’s Microdermabrasion Creme at £62 from Space NK. They been pushing me towards it  for weeks. I’m also uplifted to hear that Kiehl’s have brought out a bronzer in the ‘Facial Fuel’ range.

I feared for the Multis. No Tory victory. Unthinkable. Dreadful silence all day yesterday. Could they have self-gassed or self-hurled from the penthouse balcony?  But no, today straight back up again. The Photographer Multi graphing away. Amazing.  The spirit that has made England and Poor Little Rich Gays.

They managed to have lunch. See graphs below.

Today is the 80th birthday of the Photographer Multi’s mother. She declined all grandeur and hordes of Poor Little Rich Gays at a function. She is absolute king-pin and churchwoman in her village.Instead there is to be a quiet dinner.

I leave these graphs, sent today by the Photographer Multi, to speak for themselves.

The Multis First Home Lunch of the Hung Parl Era

The Multis' View

The Photographer Multi's Mother's 80th Birthday Card

Venue for Photographer Multi's Mother's 80th Birthday Dinner Tonight - Pre-Inspected by the Multis

Multi Champagne Goes on in the Coalition Era

Friday 7th May 2010

I voted Labour, then put on Prada.

But the result is perfect Poor Little Rich Gay.