Tuesday 22^nd September 2009

 I’m sorry, I’ve got behind, with so much going on. The Nicole Farhi Show will have to wait until tomorrow. And I’ve an armful of functions to cover. The Autumn Season is getting  underway – do you remember Entertaining Mr Sloane, when the crazy sister says to her brother who appears to be about to attend an all-male event: ‘Will there be ladies? Ladies is nice at a function’ ?

 I met Lord Arrowby at Borough Market (this is just food stalls in an unprepossessing part of  London, worshipped in an annoying way by some) last Saturday morning, as I said I would. Only now can I bring myself to write about it. I was seven minutes late, for a start. ‘You’re far too interested in money,’ he said, ‘I know you’re only aiming for a small readership, but all the same, you’ll put most people off.’  He referred to my poor blog. Oh dear! I did most meekly suggest: hadn’t I raised the spectre that money might be ruinous? Hadn’t I asked the question: what’s money for? Also, it’s just a fact, a significant proportion of gays have turned out to be rather good at making or earning money in luxurious quantities, including, if I may say so, Lord A, your good self.

 But no, Lord Arrowby is being ruined by a dentist at Wandsworth. His tooth still isn’t right. You might recall that it split on the Île de Ré (look: accents!). His is a life of service, no huge earnings. I’d got it all wrong.

 It has to be faced. Some people can’t bear money to be mentioned. The Gay Mother is one of them. Just can’t bear it. Nor spent unless absolutely necessary. This is not from anxiety that it might run out but because it is the right thing to do. 

 Let us hope that Lord Arrowby will be the steel anchor preventing us all from hurtling off into madness.

 On parting, I showed the pink waistband of my pants – those Calvin Klein ones worn by teenagers. Only the waistband is pink. Not deliberately, you understand. Everyone’s pants are showing these days, aren’t they? It just happened. Anyway, Lord A most benign and amused by spectacle of 52-year-old in such garb. Actually shrieked.

Friday 18th September 2009

Lord Arrowby texted – a rare event, I can tell you.  He plays hard to get – with me, at least.

You remember him – very high up, some kind of government advisor.  But glamorous and blue-eyed beyond anything seen in government circles for generations.   In the Balearics, he says (I’m copying from the text to get the spelling right.  Lord A’s spelling  faultless,you can sure of that). ‘With someone “new”? ‘I reply. ‘In Ibiza? ‘. I imagine some sort of disco holiday with non-English ‘friend’. But no, in Mallorca (Lord A’s spelling), at a 5 star (hurray!) on secret business (probably something to do with identity cards). Not La Residenca either. That’s the famous Mallorca hotel where poor Simon Limpney was done in by the spa treatments and had to be air-lifted out by the armed forces or the fire brigade or both.

I couldn’t help it. All this going on on Wednesday while I was playing cards with Marcus Cargill and the photographer Multi at Marcus’s flat in Covent Garden. Was rather drunk. But Lord A so Mr Darcy-ish and reproving, too tempting to get silly. ‘Any treatments?’ I go. ‘Any waxing?’ ‘By the way,’ I text, ‘I’ve been doing press-ups in the mornings’. I’ve not mentioned this before. I’m trying for a new gay body in my fifties. ‘Maybe on the way home, at the airport, you’ll see some pants in my size.’ This actually a serious request.  You remember my pants’ crisis still on-going from the summer sales when I bought Large. So saddled with bloomers.

Lord Arrowby awfully frosty, of course. He’s just not that kind of Poor Little Rich Gay. But I think he likes the attention. I’m seeing him tomorrow at Borough Market, at 10.

Can’t wait. Do you think he’ll be cross?

Thursday 17^th September 2009

 I’m not well-disposed towards the Elton Johns.  That place they’ve got near Windsor looks like a girls’ school. Such an undistinguished building could not possibly be inhabited by people of taste or discrimination.  What a nerve to appoint themselves head gays and queen of queens!

 The photographer Multi once graphed David Furnish, though, and liked him.

 Now they are besotted by a 14-month-old baby in a Ukrainian orphanage and want to adopt. But the Ukrainian authorities are saying: gay adoption not welcome. You never know though, with people like this. They can find a way round anything.

 Do they know what they’re doing?

 An Edwardian lady was dressed for church. She thought some matching children would be charming and sent for one in blue and another in yellow. At premieres Joan Crawford (now known to have been a wicked mother) always released her children from the limo a good while before she herself emerged. She then made a huge performance of greeting and kissing them as if she hadn’t seen them for ages.  Nicole Kidman, at a charity premiere of The Hours I went to with the Multis, petted an adorable child but, owing to her frockage and shoes, was unable to walk unassisted.

 Children can be a delightful decorative adjunct.  And the best sort of children are camp and crazy and unlimited and fit perfectly into the Poor Little Rich Gay scene. Only on Sunday I visited the blond Multi’s mother. After lunch seven thousand of her ten thousand grandchildren appeared. One had made a cake like a fantastical sea-creature. It was chocolate studded with alarming bright blue chips, fruit pastels and edible snakes. There were two boys of outstanding eccentricity last seen by me as triumphant, under-age (and I mean about three or four) drivers of quad-bikes at high-speeds.

 But this plan of the Eltons won’t do. Don’t forget Mottram and Robert Nevil and I are familiar with the orphanage world. I can just imagine the scene. These children are very affectionate as well they might be, being starved of affection. But to uproot one and put it in that girls’ school. I don’t think so.

 It’s hard to believe they’ve thought the whole thing through.

 As it happens I don’t approve of gay adoption. Children need a mother. But I’ll admit the double daddy option is a better alternative to a children’s home where no straight parents are available.  From the other side as it were, I fear this trend towards uniformity. What’s the point of being gay if you’re going to do all the things the straights do?

Wednesday 16th September 2009

Ironing and bed linen has done it this time – the Poor Little Rich Gays have been wheeling out the missile launchers after a couple of chance remarks in my Sunday posting. Mrs Solomon Bung of California cannot imagine anyone self-ironing (I know that doesn’t mean what I want it to, but I’m not going to let that stand in my way), Laura Malcolm, our only, treasured, straight commentator, condemns the ‘bourgeois’ preoccupation with high-end bed linen manifested by some PLRGs.

 Mrs S Bung, who appears to be at least an honorary PLRG, once made a distinction between 4 and 5 star hotels, you know. She said, 4 Star – Death , 5 star – Life. Simple as that.  Don’t tell me there isn’t cruelty in Poor Little Rich Gay life – of a bracing and necessary kind, of course.

 As you know, I have never been quite rich enough. So I have to think what I can get away with when no-one is looking. Ironing, certainly; and eating. A few potatoes will go a long way. But, to tell you the truth, I wouldn’t let staff near my frockage in any case unless they had had 40 years’ experience running the Queen Mother’s duster coats. You chose your pieces, often in agony; at last you find something that’s right. To then have it boiled alive and scorched by the cleaner –  it’s unthinkable. Top Gay life abounds with stories of laundry disasters occasioned by staff. Rufus Pitman discovered that his femme de ménage had been moistening the ironing with Windolene. The Limpney/Smallmeals often appear with their Gucci lifeless and bleached at the edges by their supremely gloomy lady from Hackney. In Prague, Anthony Mottram takes an ironed shirt out of the cupboard…puts it on  – no buttons. Sheared off by aggressive, meat-eating Old (I’ll have to explain another time. ‘Old’ is Mottram-speak for cleaner) as part of the ironing process. The cleaner of a frosty Poor Little Rich Gay called Sebastian Scott ( in fact not a PLRG because grim and no fun), something huge in TV, spent an entire morning bashing the £1000 creases out of his Issey Miyake – not a house I have ever worn.

 Bed linen is another matter. The glory of this business about thread-counts is – it’s new. For at least the first 49 years of my life it was never mentioned. We like new. Otherwise there’s just death.

 So there is disagreement and diversity. Each grand gay will insist that there is only one true path – and that’s their way of doing things. All our born days we might wonder what it is to be a Poor Little Rich Gay. Last week I suggested that goodness was not part of it. But Mottram has declined involvement in the Ceausescus’ rat-poison venture on moral grounds. I was wrong. Taking a moral stand is somehow possible in a life of sublime frivolity – especially when there is a chance to be a nuisance.

 These days there is an idea that we are all the same: men and women, gays and straights. It is wrong to talk about difference. It is stereo-typing, it is discriminatory. But I prefer difference. Difference is the point, it seems to me.

 Even though we cannot be sure what the difference is.

 What is certain, though, is that to be a Poor Little Rich Gay is a demanding calling; Poor Little Rich Gays must have plenty of rest in the afternoons.

Tuesday 15th September 2009

Do you know Separate Tables by Terry Ratty (that’s Terence Rattigan, to be boring)? The great climax is when the down-trodden daughter finally stands up to her awful tyrant mother, played by Dame Sybil Thorndike in the film version. She says: ‘No, Mummy, no!  I’m going to stay here and talk to the Major.’ It is Anthony Mottram’s favourite moment in all of drama apart from most of Brief Encounter. It is strange that one who has enjoyed numerous sizzling romances with very young men as well as a 40-year equal partnership of some kind or other with me should be obsessed by these tales of stiffled, desperate women: ‘I told myself I wouldn’t go. How could I? But then Thursday came and, of course, like a fool, I went.’

But that’s another story.

Last night I had a dream. I was saying, ‘No, Mottram, no!  I’m staying here with the kitchen (see glossary). I’m going to help him get a really good arms’ deal.’

What could it mean?

Sunday 13^th September 2009

 Did you see Toby Young in The Spectator last week on the infinite superiority of holiday cotts in Cornwall honed for the gay market – spotless lavs, Agas, ‘walk-in’ fridges, no new pine furniture? What a coincidence that Prince Dmitri Hersov, as you might already have heard, should have launched out last Friday in the Porsche, in the opposite direction as it were, for a Stag Weekend in Eastbourne.

 By the way, I must adjust my rude remarks about accountants’ lack of frockage and flowers in yesterday’s posting, ‘The Gay Mother Gives me a Mine’. Prince Dmitri, as you know, was at the accountancy school and is now with a huge firm doing hush-hush work but anyone more stunningly got up for the office would be hard to imagine. Really, we can’t have people bursting out of their stereotypes like this. It’s an Edwardian look – complicated built suits, many buttons and flaps, heavy shoes, cuff-links like the Multis. But the colleagues are a mystery. At work, the Prince was once watching afternoon television – because his very silly, queenly friend, Thomas Blaikie, was appearing to promote his even sillier book about the Royal Fambly. Other accountants gathered round: ‘You have dinner with people like that, do you?’ they said.

 But the stag weekend… It has been suggested that Prince Dmitri should have refused the invitation , but let it not be said that gays shy away from other walks of life. In any case, he found the experience interesting, even enchanting, but bizarre. The hotel was a kind of hostel. Rooms were shared. At clay-pigeon shooting, Dmitri was the only one to score 0 out of 25. Everywhere they went there was nothing but other stag parties of varying size and horror. All meals, including dinner, were taken in Wetherspoons (I’m really not bothering to check the spelling) on account of the Sport TV.  I didn’t know that stag parties were so basic, did you? All the men on this one were well-off and not especially young. Most intriguing was the evening strip-club. Members of other stag parties paid £40 for a private show, then pounded out of the club to the cash machine for more private shows. What were they were getting out of this? No touching, no wanking, obviously. In gay clubs go-go boys etc are there to inspire congress amongst the clientele either on the spot or later. This plainly not the case with the stag party. Some of the staggers apparently fell into a despair or joy of drunkenness and were observed by the Prince vomiting over walls etc.

 In the meantime, Laura Malcolm is withering away after her first Gay Holiday in Tuscany with the Multis. We have been wondering how hets would respond to a Gay Holiday and now we know. Never before had her surrender to pleasure been so complete (that can’t be entirely true, but there we are…). Back in London, she cannot adjust to normal life. I have to say, even though she’s got an elliptical island unit designed by Bruce MacBain and a built-in cappuccino machine that speaks, three children do generate an enormous amount of ironing.

 What would be the effect, therefore, of a stag weekend devised by Poor Little Rich Gays for straight men? Endless role play to get the tone just right – this is how you banter with staff, this is how you complain, this is how you acquire interesting friends who aren’t mates.  This is how you become a multi and avoid being an employee. No Kenneth Williams, you understand. That would be quite wrong.  There would be ruthless gym work-outs and a talk from my friend, Edward Jasper, on bed linen and bed-making, just to get it clear that you can never have too much detail.

 Exposure to the free, headlong, material, made-up world of the Poor Little Rich Gays (you’d have to bring in Val, whether sober or not, to do his rendition of the wax cylinder recording of Adelina Patti) could be fatal. How many of these straights would ever look back?

Saturday 12th September 2009

The Gay Mother has given me a mine. Don’t worry, it just means hours closeted in offices made of cardboard with those strips hanging in the windows like lav paper while  chronically heterosexual lawyers and accountants explain the tax position and I crack open with boredom, to borrow a phrase from stunning novel A Case of Knives by Candia McWilliam.

And then their enormous bills.

I’d have thought they could run to a bit of Miu Miu on what they get. And a dramatic flower arrangement on a pillar.

They’re no fun at all. But I suppose that’s the point of them.

I’ve given the Gay Mother some Pan Forte di Siena (not sure about the ‘di’) in return for the mine.

My invitation has come to the Nicole Farhi Show next Sunday. It is said Anna Wintour will be there. And on Tuesday it’s the Wolseley with the Multis. So things are looking up.

Wednesday 9th September 2009

Anthony Mottram is to dine with Ceausescu family remnants on Saturday.  He is flung into a moral dilemma which strikes at the  heart of Little Rich Gay life and illuminates my own Smallmeal crisis.  Exceptionally, I am removing  his outstanding remarks from the Comments department and putting them on the front page.  You can imagine, it has not been difficult to stand by a mind of this quality for the last 40 years, even though, given less than half a chance, he would take this blog over entirely.

Mottram says: ‘The path of this blog, I presume, is the moral exploration of rich gaiety. So I have a troublesome question for Edge.

I am travelling now to Bucharest, where on Saturday I shall dine with the residual Ceausescus (you will remember that a few of them were put up against a wall at the end of 1989, an unexpected Christmas gift from an ungrateful people). They are consulting me on their investment in the manufacture of rat poison. The question is, how should a Poor Little Rich Gay comport himself with the families of fallen dictators?

You see, in some ways they resemble us closely: they deplore convention (in their case the conventions of democracy), spurn the masses, are indifferent to suffering (certainly if of others), have a high regard for frockage, retain a sense of entitlement even following eviction from office, demand total and obedient service, possess vast amounts of money, are usually elegant and always haughty, and make careful use of make-up and cosmetic surgery. Do you think it is sufficient acknowledgement of the suffering of millions to adopt a slight frown (say no more than a second or two) as we are introduced?

I must know by Saturday.’

And you shall.

Leave it to others, in organic sandals and non-child-reared cotton, to be moral and self-sacrificing. I notice you do not consider cancelling your dinner with the Ceaus. You need that rat poison deal to fund your Museum apartment in Prague, your daily housekeeper, your three-week holidays in long-haul boutique hotels with your current non-paying kitchen, your kitchen’s designer knickers etc.

Poor Little Rich Gays are called on to add to the gaiety of nations.  That is enough. Through this blog those less fortunate can glimpse a glittering life. This is giving.

Earnestness would not suit. There are plenty it does. What’s more, as you point out, Poor Little Rich Gays have much in common with dictators. It was wickedly said, when the Multis first opened their present Riverside apartment, ‘Saddam Hussein would have favoured this decor.’  It’s not true of course. It was just all the marble and onyx that suggested it.

 Tuesday 9th September 2009

I am being blackmailed – by dubious pretenders to the name of Smallmeal, threatening to expose my supposedly cruel treatment of their adored relation. If you look at recent comment, you’ll see.

 They will get nowhere; they’re all frauds. Besides Robin Smallmeal has behaved monstrously.  He may be of humble appearance (apart from the Lord Lichfield-style heap of now grey hair, as I saw at Glyndebourne the other day), but he is not to be endured. As for Simon Limpney – he used to be so amusing; he is just a touch fragile.

But, no, I will not be tempted to feel sorry for them. They must be resisted. It is my duty. 

Don’t misunderstand. I had not expected to have arch-enemies in my fifties. I have made various rather grim and solemn attempts at reconciliation. I don’t believe in feuds. But the Limpney/Smallmeals do not reply. They are inclined to slam down if telephoned. They are implacable.

So, I’ve no choice but to enjoy hostilities to the max.

 Which is exactly what I’m going to do. Call it revenge, if you like.

 Be also assured  – there is no powerful Smallmeal dynasty, no African branch. Smallmeal was reared in terraced house near the station at Stevenage, a respectable if non-descript dormitory town for London, England. He is a self-made man, you see. Self boot-strapped up. Etc. Miracle of the democratic system. Capitalism’s finest. Limpney is the one from the top drawer (or second one down strictly speaking). Like me, he is LG (that’s Landed Gentry. Robert Nevil is also LG). I’ve kept quiet about it because it doesn’t sit well with being a poor little rich gay. Also one keeps quiet full stop. Being born with a silver spoon in the is a kind of disgrace these days. That’s what Limpney and I had in common – both being LG, used to large country house, ancestral ‘things’, the odd Reynolds, fearful lack of income to support, lovely old granny with handbag and hankie stored in long knickers in the freezing winter.

 Then Limpney got deadly serious about pedigree cats.