Wednesday 7^th April 2010

Val, leading Poor Little Rich Gay and valiant embracer of the bottle, went to Glasgow for Easter, to stay in Greek Thomson’s house. Miracle that he went anywhere at all and big glimmer of hope. Some weeks ago, he was in decline again. The flight back was peanut-free. The on-board announcement said, ‘If you are carrying peanuts, please refrain from eating them.’ I said, ‘What about your Human Rights, Val?’ He said: ‘I know. I’m founding The Peanut Officionados Out Front or POOF’. The only trouble is it’s aficionados.

Never mind. But normally just the sort of thing Val knows. If you’re ever troubled for the difference between raw and boiled linseed oil, he’s the one to ask.

So, with what other freedoms can we expect flights to be labelled? I’d welcome ‘Sweet corn-free’. Can’t bear it. But ‘Grilled Aubergine with pomegranate molasses-free’ would be awful.

I suppose nut-allergy’s at the bottom of it. But what’s the point if you fail to mention all the other nuts? Maybe Joshua Baring was on board, the young man with ultra-modern nut aversion, who dined in my lovely home last week and who, incidentally, hasn’t been heard of since.

In Scotland, Val visited the Paisley Shawl Museum and gained an introduction to the Keeper of the Shawls. He was ravished by the shawls. Fine work, jacquard looms – absolutely his thing. Val is a maker, you know. Can upholster, cut on the bias, do drawn-thread work, make handbags. He also roasted a shoulder of pork, or assisted his host. The meat had been vacuum-packed and they almost had to take a hair-drier to the skin to get it dry enough for crackling. Val asked for a scalpel but they hadn’t got one. Essential, apparently, for scoring the rind which should be done every 3/16 to 1/8 of an inch.

Oh, Val’s plum tart in its day, rectangular, and every piece of plum identical in size and laid out exquisitely – same degree of overlap, same distance apart.

On return to London, Val wonders about becoming a sea-side landlady – except that he hasn’t got his greeting outfit clear. Maybe navy polka-dot frock with lacy collar and cuffs, detachable for ease of laundering. He aims to be a cross between Sarah Gamp and Muriel Belcher.

Monday 5^th April 2010

I got some nice cutlets. The Gay Mother likes cutlets. I cooked them for her, with a lemon and oregano salsa. Her only comment: ‘Is yours done?’ Deathly silence.

Last year, she was in torment for days because the Easter lamb for Cousin Smurry and Aunt Smidge wasn’t hot – so she said.

Then I get a text from the lovely Lord Arrowby: ‘My mother is being very rude about English lamb….only fit for the Merchant Navy etc.’

Which is strange because when I was eight, Easter was early and English lamb was not available or too expensive. The Gay Mother got New Zealand. I passed the lunch hour on the swing, boycotting the horror.

In one way and another, you can see why we grew up Poor Little Rich Gays, can’t you?

There’s always trouble about the Easter lamb. Some people don’t have it, which is outrageous. It is absolutely required, the Lamb of Sacrifice also strangely to be eaten by believers which I am not. But I shed a tear during the singing of ‘Thine be the Glory, risen, conquering son’ in church yesterday. Easter is in every way superior to Christmas. No soppy baby with ‘Away in a Manger’ being sung at it. Instead the glamour and terror of the Resurrection and much better hymns.

Cousin Smurry’s still battling with that puppy (you remember Christmas was near cancelled on account of), so she and Aunt Smidge couldn’t come over to us as per for lamb roast. Instead they offered a casserole (a joint impossible because of dog)  in their house.

Well, it was a lamb casserole – and good. The Gay Mother did not wither it.

Lamb Cutlet Rejected by the Gay Mother

Saturday 3^rd April 2010

I’m at the Gay Mother’s for Easter. Tuesday last was one of my chaotic dinners, pre-paschal/Passover, ten dining, crammed into my picturesque artisan’s cott in London’s North. Lord Arrowby couldn’t come; Robert Nevil couldn’t come. Anthony Mottram – we’re on speakers, but the rift isn’t healed. Will it be?

Inside I am suffering. Marcus Cargill, England’s leading clock mender, who dines, tells me that AM is borrowing his London flat over Easter and was in London last week.

But the divine Multis come in glory, with three bottles of Chateau Rare and Tres Grand Cost, the Blond in a new, tailor-made suit of sumptuous blue velvet, the Photographer furious with the Government: more regs bossing landlords about, he says. Insufferable.  This week they have probably bought six more flats to rent out. It’s hard to keep up. They had that lunch at Coutts Bank, by the way. I forgot to tell you. Funny little bare room with what looked like flexi-walls from the graphs.

Ralph Kitto, banker, owner of top-drawer contemporary art collection, mistakes Laura Malcolm for the widow of Joseph Ettedgui, of the Joseph shops, who dropped the other day. I just prevent him from hurling forward with emergency condolences. Laura has made a chocolate cake (total fat death in every delicious mouthful), wilfully not conceding to the nut allergy of Joshua Baring, the youngest guest, only 27, and new, very coming, has never dined before. Is Jewish, up to a point, hence the Passover aspect.  With the grandeur of the young, arrives by taxi, bringing costly and previously unheard of gifts – exceptional fringed tulips, resembling old-fashioned coconut icing, and chocs from one-off shop in Bayswater called Cocomaya. Absolutely superb. You must have them.

Joshua is highly wrought, very clever, very advanced in shopping, particular, rare, knows everything  but not  malicious, loves Britain’s Got Talent.  He has been at the gruesome London Gay and Lesbian Film Festival with Robert Nevil. We shall be hearing more.

But I am worried about his nut allergy, even though it’s very modern . I would have liked a bulance on hand throughout, rather like that fire engine that is always stationed outside Bayreuth during performances because the theatre is all-wood.

The dinner gets underway. The Multis are pleased by the roasted aubergine with oregano and coriander with tahini. In fact they say it is the best first course they’ve ever had.

Where would I be without them?

The meat main is the Ashkenazi alternative – stuffed shoulder of lamb. See Nigella’s Feast, chapter on the Passover. Untidy on the plate, quite a lot of fat, a great slick of which somehow gets all over my frockage. So I am martyred in the kitchen, as saucepans, cutlery, dishes, debris proliferate. The dining table, too, begins to heap with wrappings, bits of string, corks, Lord knows what. How nice, I think, to be Third World and not have any possessions. On the other hand, I could have gloved staff, lifting, clearing, sweeping, washing up (with the gloves off, presume), putting away. But then the guests would be cowed and we’d be eating catering food as if at Massivebury, the desolate get-a-hose-to-the-door-and-pump-in-a-million -pounds country seat of the Smallmeal/Limpneys, my absolute fuck-off and slam-down non-friends.

And it’s too expensive. Are guests either cowed or contemptuous?

As I scurry, hostessing, with my fat stigmata (right, though, for Holy Week), I catch snippets, the guests, as with the rubbish piling up on the table, growing wilder and wilder.

‘Massivebury!’

I can’t believe it. Does Ralph Kitto know the Smallmeal/Limpneys?  ‘We haven’t been invited,’ someone says. ‘Deadly,’ says someone else.

I fly past with the tea and coffee service. Fragments. Still the Smallmeal/Limpneys?

‘…someone who goes to the gym that much.’

‘…£30,000 on business-class flights to Ventimiglia…’

‘There are two things that make him totally demented…’

‘Someone had actually died…’

‘It’s worth £10 million.’

‘If he thinks people have got more money than him….’

‘He was never management…’

‘All that slapper said was, “The boyfriend will get all the money”’

‘Or if he thinks they’ve got better connections…’

‘Not even fit to push the toiletries trolley…’

Some time later. It doesn’t sound like the Smallmeal/Limpneys. I shunt back and forth. The coffee’s run out. The cups are fiddly.

‘I don’t think I’ve been privileged to see Carlos’s leather-gear.’

This is Laura Malcolm. I can tell, she being the only lady present. This is from the Ralph Kitto, Blond Multi end of the table. Carlos?  Is this the considerably younger, gym-expanded Carlos who is partner of multi-millionaire, Sol Weideinwar, reported by me the other day as being unhappy in luxury’s lap and wanting to go out to work? I cannot tell. But both Ralph  and Laura know Sol, as they might have discovered. Laura and I rather like Carlos. I strain to hear more but nothing further wings its way.

How do the young prosper when plucked from obscurity and pressed to the bosom of a doting, lavish multi? We must wait and see.

Exceptional Coconut-Icing Tulips Brought by Joshua Baring

Superb New Chocolate Source Revealed by Joshua Baring

Thursday 1^st April 2010

Dhiren Dutta, who is having such a success with his novel about lack of hygiene in India (and elsewhere, as it turns out – my God, it shows the underbelly, migrant workers, sprout picking. Very good. Better in many ways than White Tiger), had a highly original cake and wine party at 8.30 in the evening.  It was his birthday. Not at all Indian. None of those grubby little sweet paste things but meringue, Victoria sponge, muffin, all made by Dhiren in person. He and his partner have transported to a rented flat in London’s Pimlico district while their kitchen is being re-done. Isn’t that fuck-off and grand? They’ve got their cat with them.

Dhiren is new in my life, which is thrilling. I didn’t think there’d be anyone new after fifty.

Helmut Mutti, the publisher, minus girlfriend, confides that intimacy was rife amongst the boys at his prep and public (that’s junior and senior boarding schools if you’re US or foreign). ‘Older and younger?’ I ask. ‘Sex slaves? Abusive?  Masters involved.’ Apparently not. His eyes twinkle and sparkle delightfully. Was he embroiled? Who knows. But now for sure he is straight. He came out as such later during Arjan Bose’s great outpouring about the clap clinic (read on). ‘I’m straight,’ he said. It was an intriguing reversal. Twenty years ago in a social setting someone might confess: ‘I’m gay and I’m glad,’ while those around cast their eyes down.

Robert Nevil very much to the fore, mostly with glass thrust out for a refill. He is in between gruelling bouts of the London Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, about which we will be hearing. Blanche Spain, the jewelled novelist, also, chiselling a very fine groove. I couldn’t get near enough for content but I know she was soaring.

The real sensation was Arjan Bose, the tiny Indian doctor friend of Robert Nevil’s (even smaller than the latter if that were possible),who lodges in Frankie-Doreen Gunn and Giles Ullerston’s basement flat. Known mainly for his stunning Indian fabrics teamed with Top Man. Rarely speaks but doesn’t need to. Awfully handsome. Well, suddenly completely in his stride re: the clap clinic where he is presently serving. Big audience on the sofa, including frightening Indian woman novelist and Dhiren’s ginger cat, which was resting on a chair nearby.

I’d heard from Robert Nevil that Arjan had had trouble locating the cervix, women in the hosp queuing up for him to practise on. Now he’s moved on to men, mostly gay. They’re pouring in, claiming to be having regular sex with three or four partners. When examined they get hard-ons. ‘I haven’t got a penis,’ the frightening Indian woman novelist exclaims with fierce pride. The older ones are confessional: ‘I’ve been naughty,’ they say. The younger ones are more brazen. Poor Arjan is bewildered and a bit depressed: ‘What a revelation! Is this how relationships are?’

It would be fascinating if it were true – and rather Poor Little Rich Gay.

Of course some of the patients are attractive. As their doctor, he has their phone numbers. But he must be professional and remote. He can hardly call up and say, ‘How’s your clamidia? Do you fancy a date?’

I heard once that midwives are professional-group-most-likely-to-be-single. You can see why. Only absolutely shit man likely to be met in circs of the birthing room. Maybe clap doctors are the second most likely to be single?

Anyway, at the end of all this, our host is suddenly manifest, as a face, with teeth bared, from behind the sofa. ‘I hate that cat,’ he hisses. ‘I want to ring its neck.’ But he loves the cat, which is long-haired and quite elderly. I’m sure of it.

Monday 29^th March 2010

Last Thursday to the Cobden Club, beside London’s Grand Union Canal, remote, grimy, but cutting edge, where Eddie is having another art show, almost exactly a week after the last one in Spitalfields.

Talk about creative!

Names, different ones, present. Eddie in tiny frockage, but his jacket longer than mine, we decide, and his hair more done. Mine is criticised as winged. Vibrant work, some of it only drying on the kitchen table the day before, apparently. But I don’t pay as much attention as I should. Miss Lallian Lark, of the Titlark Tours, is there!

The joy of being re-united. Miss Lallian was compere of unsurpassed bus outings many years ago, with her friend, Alberta Cowman-Parsons. Robert Nevil featured as Mrs Murphy, a grim Irishwoman, whose husband was buried at St Leonard’s Streatham and whose own vocation was a cleaning woman at the Design Centre in the Haymarket. Mrs Murphy went to the Royal Wedding of 1981, you know. She was fur-trimmed, even though it was summer. Eddie Sedgewick was her daughter, Concepta, an extraordinarily leggy slapper with a number of children in care. Titlark could pitch you up at a smart country house hotel for a banquet where the dainty first course pie-lettes turned out to contain only plastic shapes which had given off noxious fumes in the heating up. Or it might be Kensington Town Hall for a dinner dance. Here Mrs Murphy swayed awkwardly to Frank Sinatra with an unknown man and nearly married him. To this day, Robert Nevil could have been living in Kilburn, a latent tabloid head-line: ‘Hubby Never Knew Sicko Charlady Wife was a Man! ’

Instead of writing a history of the Pony Club known here and throughout the world.

Laura Malcolm and her art-student son, Kelm, very much taken up by Eddie Sedgewick (Poor Little Rich Gays must start investing in the young now) also there. Laura announces she’s on a diet. She will eat nothing for three months. But Kelm is peckish (growing boy, only 19). Laura fetches chips from the bar of the club, also a second, fatal, as it turns out, bottle of wine. We wrench the chips out of the poor young man’s mouth and into our own. I become incapable, quite drunk. Is Kelm getting fat? I’m absorbed by this question to the extent of prodding him in the chest, not an ideal approach if I’m to have more young people in my life.

He’s not getting fat, at least.

Saturday 27^th March 2010

Val has been texting.  A sure sign that he is re-united with drink, but there we are. The sudden blossoming of lunch parties after Christmas was a false spring, I fear.

He announces that the Juliet Balcony is the home accessory this season. I must get the Polish builders back at once. All that is needed is a set of French windows half way up the building with a dainty iron balustrade across the lower half to ensure that I do not plummet to premature death at any point during my Juliet phase.

So not really a balcony at all. But the perfect alternative to choc for an Easter present.

Thursday 25^th March 2010

A Tate Private View is unsurpassed. I never thought to achieve two in as many months – Chris Ofili in January; on Monday, Henry Moore, owing to the property outfit for which my friend, Peter Acharya, works sponsoring it.

Flowers ten feet in the air, stage lighting, unceasing canapés and champagne. Queens must have been at work. But it is a manly affair as we shall see. When planning, executives were only interested in the champagne aspect and contrived many tastings, I am told.

Property must be looking up. In fact it is. Peter Acharya said so. Last year this company only ran to a funny little exhibition of one or two paintings by Constable at the National Portrait Gallery.

Surveyors, lawyers, contractors, all men with large hands.  The bit of the Duveen Gallery under the dome and the vast adjoining room where Beata Beatrix hangs – seething, seething with men. Almost as many grey suits as at that Tory Party rally I went to with the Multis. This is the property world. Only a handful of women, all dead-ringers for the one who sits beside Alan Sugar in The Apprentice.

Now, if you want to comprehend truly Poor Little Rich Gays, study The Apprentice – for it is the exact opposite.

I saw two men outside, arriving together by taxi. Straight men when paired in public have a barely perceptible rigidity, a slightly higher than required angle to the chin, which wards off  mis-understanding.

Our party is different: an artist, a restaurateur or chef or owner of nursing homes or all three, a scion of a department store who has never worked or not much, a make-up artist and a lady of 85 with superb ash-blonde coiffure and grey satin party dress, said to drive a over-land vehicle down Marylebone High Street causing a sensation on the pavement.

We meet the Chairman of the Stock Exchange, grey suit, 60-odd, who says: ‘The exhibition’s well worth a look. Only drawback – downstairs and no food or drink.’ The ash-blonde lady of 85 is very soigné, back and forth with the Chairman of the Stock Exchange, evidently very much her tea’s cup. Then we have the PA to Stephen Hester, Chief Executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland. She says, ‘Hang on to your RBS shares.’

The make-up artist and I recall the time Elizabeth Arden hurled Estee Lauder, still in curlers and pink gown, out of her salon in the Place Vendome

I have Estee’s autobiography. It is called A Success Story.  Never published here, owing to being beyond belief, I should imagine. I must tell you about it one day.

Wednesday 24^th March 2010

Archway Road on London’s fringes. Monday tea-time. Ferocious dual-carriageway with goodly fence down the middle. Some schoolboys, aged maybe twelve, trying to catch a bus. Shall I mention that they are black?  I think I will. Only drawback – they are on the wrong side of the road. Bus is almost at the stop. Two of them impala across, leap the central fence, legs horizontal, the full splits. The third is on crutches. Takes his side of the road in about three huge crutch-driven arcs. Comes up against the fence. What to do now? I see from my official self-driven car approaching, first one crutch, then the other, flung onto the opposite carriageway, followed by the boy scrambling over. Then he is hop and skip, dot and carry one, several times nearly falling flat on face, with crutches tucked under the arm, careering towards that bus.

Whether he catches it or not, I could not say. My car passed by.

Monday 22^nd March 2010

Ed Jasper, the bed-linen expert and millionaire: Saturday, his dinner party at his London home.

This occasion was diarised before Christmas. Canonbury residence.  We foregather in the drawing room.  Ten dining. Champagne. Brocade, damask, massive swirling gilt mirrors, tapestry cushions, curtains six inches thick, curvaceous French furniture, what are called oil paintings. Everything in absolutely superb condition.

Ed has devoted the last twenty years, although running an exceptionally lucrative business, to décor,  bed linen being a priority.  First of all a huge, semi-derelict castle in Highgate, now town and country places, house and garden. Last summer, you recall, he had the entire top floor of this London demesne re-configured, including new bathroom, specially for his mother’s three-week visit.

Endless, endless work. The result: perfection. Some of the most finished homes known. This is what the very rich achieve: finish. It is the same at Massivebury, the Smallmeal/Limpney country estate, and at the Mottram Museum apartment in Prague. Nobody has gone wiggly with the silicone gun, failed to paint a straight line, left the corners when plastering lumpy.

There’s a nice lady, a country neighbour of Ed’s. She asks me if I got ill after the Wolseley, after our lunch there at the beginning of February. I am astonished. As it happens I did, but some time later. I hadn’t made the connection.  ‘Both ends,’ she said. ‘Thirty hours afterwards. We all went down.’

But apparently there’s no move to sue or even seek lighter redress.

Downstairs the dining room is oak-panelled, dark oak, fully medieval. Only flaming torches on the walls missing. Heavy crystal goblets on the massive round oak table. Gorgeous red lacquer place mats (see graph below). Also downstairs an exceptional medieval lav, or rather a modern one encased in a thunder-box with heavy wooden seat and lid. Outstanding carpentry. Stone floor, of course.

Riordan McFee, TV critic of a leading tabloid newspaper, non-gay, is the star guest.  He is another kind of guest often on breakfast TV. Is sometimes stopped in Park Lane by strangers who want to be graphed with him. He’d like more of that, he says. Tremendous thunderer, against virtually everything – Susan Boyle, Sport Relief, Tim Henman. Handsome though. The gay guests tell him how young he looks and he’s not quite sure what to do with himself.

These gays are in tweeds, possibly not entirely intended, and since last seen by me have gone magnificently bald. Ed used to know all kinds of whippy bitch-slappers in designer frockage but now he’s settled down. Or has he? His setting may be luxe beyond belief but his mouth is elsewhere. The nice both ends lady from the country complimented him on his self-made lemon tart (excellent wholesome, straightforward dinner by the way). ‘I was hoping it would excite your pudenda ,’ he said and she shrieked with thrill as never before. She said her son, that every night in New York, had been invited by Scarlet Johansson, somehow met by chance, to Jennifer Anniston’s party but wasn’t going, was staying in with some mates over from London.

Obviously completely normal.

Ed Jasper's Glassware and Lacquer Mats

Saturday 20^th March 2010

The postman needed a wheelbarrow. Two entire pages about that paint sample they made me send because they won’t believe the latest tin of HC92 they supplied for my stairs at a cost of £80 is not the same colour as the ones I’ve had before.

Actually postpeople have a wheelbarrow anyway, don’t they? See, how I get carried away.

Look at it! It’s graphed below.  ‘Dear Mr Egder’ for a start! Can you see that list a)b)c)d)?  Then they go as far as 1, 2, 3, 4. And bits actually in Greek.

As if I’d want to look at their website to find out about the Minolta Spectrophotometer.

It found variations even within my little paper sample of .28 Greek triangle thing, Greek E.

Overall my sample only varies by 1.57 Greek triangle thing, Greek E from paint mixed in mid 2002. Not enough apparently to justify a re-fund or another tin.

The detail!

But what about the facts, my darling Papers and Paints. My painter painted the stairs with the paint bought in 2006 or thereabouts, and finished the job with the new tin, currently in dispute.

Entirely different colour! Has a harsh spinachy hue. Quite visible to the naked eye.

Why is the eye always naked?  What would a clothed eye be?

I don’t believe a word of it. This Spectrophotometer is a figment of a crazed Professor-Brainstorm-style imagination. Then it’s just excuses, excuses, excuses. The minute people start up about the EU and pieces of legislation with numbers, we know exactly where we are.

I haven’t lost my reason, have I? If a Poor Little Rich Gay, or even an ordinary member of the public, buys a tin of paint from a shop and later on they buy another, it’s supposed to be the same colour, innit?

In a just world this letter would be evidence of insanity, provoking immediate binnage.

But I feel helpless. It’s the Smallmeal/Limpney drama all over again. I’m outmanoeuvred by an outfit with a Spectrophotometer, whether real or imagined.

I shall have to think of my next move.

Can you see the Greek?

EU regulations!

Can you See the Lists?