Sunday 18th December 2016

Christmas always seems to open in brighter days before the sense of loss and nostalgia sets in. Genevieve Suzy announced a Christmas Fayre at her daughter’s school. This establishment is funded by the State. A well-known TV director was manning the advanced salad stall. Gilded chocs were featured at another. Somehow I acquired a packet of biscotti made by Mrs Perkins of Travis Perkins fame – that’s the timber merchant chain, if you don’t know. The costume rack was entirely designer pieces, including a Dolce and Gabbana suit for £5 which Genevieve insisted I buy. It turned out the trousers were perfect for Val (too small for me). I’d won a £15 voucher for Cook in the raffle, so could afford it. Cook is a supreme ready-meals outlet for those that wish to give the effect of having cooked their own dinner party.

Genevieve’s daughter forked her entire £5 fortune on one gilded dogs’-head chocolate. We were outraged at the wickedness of stallholders but I did wonder…. Nancy Mitford was set the task by her mother of budgeting for a family with an income of £100. She put: £99, flowers. The single-minded over-spend is often the best policy. Just the one Chanel frock for £10,000 with nothing left for food, but the impact will be staggering. So maybe Genevieve’s daughter is on the right lines. Hugging money to the self never got anybody anywhere.

Earlier I’d been in the Far West with the Gay Mother for a few days. ‘Are we rich?’ the Gay Mother enquired. ‘Yes, I suppose we are,’ I said. There was a bit of a prickly pause. ‘Well, I am….’ she goes. Then she asked about Instagram. What is it? I explained and there was no comment. Later, when I was telling her that I’d got a godchild a calligraphy set for Christmas (calligraphy is huge just now with the under-12 set). ‘I’d rather teenagers were doing calligraphy than going on Instagram,’ she said.

While I was down in the Far West Cousin Paquita was sadly taken. Swept away in a matter of days. Perfectly all right in October. Then, after that, Aunt Voges had a stroke and at first her state wasn’t clear. So it was rather shattering.

Gilded Chocolate Bought by Genevieve Suzy’s Daughter with her Entire Fortune

St Paolo’s Cathedral, London, where I took a Free Messiah on 1st December. Loved the Echo. Incredible Boy Soprano did ‘I Know that My…’ This Overworn Work Somehow Made New… Curly, Sinuous and Delicious. One Number Came New to Me and Thrilled… Can’t Remember which Now

A Weimerama Seen Outside Boots in Knightsbridge. Thereby Hangs a Tale. Come Back Later for More

Saturday 11th December 2016

Genevieve Suzy phoned on Sunday at lunchtime: ‘We need a piece to camera on Her love of fake fur…. by 6 o’clock,’ she goes. ‘Well, I’m just working on stains, planting bulbs and touching up paintwork,’ I say, ‘but it can be managed’. Indeed the cogs were already whirring as she was speaking. She’s got a real fur coat, given her by the Mink Breeders of America in 1957. She wore it to visit a supermarket there, which was a special request since she’d never seen one before. The fur was out again when she opened the Victoria Line in March 1969. She rode in the public carriage without the public in it, wrapped in mink. But what of recent trimmings and accessories? Fur is essential for a Queen in winter, but has she gone fake?

Fake fur is one of the wonders of our age. How it’s come on! Progress in fake fur is a real reason to stay alive. Perhaps it’s keeping her alive as well.

Then Genevieve phones back and leaves a message: ‘I’ve got a crisis. Call at once.’ This time I text: ‘But I’m working on stains, touching up paintwork, planting bulbs and doing a piece to camera on her love of fake fur, a love which possibly will be news to her herself.’ ‘You must ring back:’ Genevieve was steely. So I give in. ‘I’m locked in the loo and about to make a dash for the front door,’ she whispers. I can’t imagine what has happened. Is she under armed siege? ‘Can I have 20 minutes of your time? I’ll bring a mince pie.’

So Genevieve arrives, ashen. In a little bag is the mince pie, plus one for her. Clearly it was kettle on even though only 3.30. Settled with the good Indian Tree set, she regained her breathing and poured forth. She’d rented out a flat but the tenant’s publicity photo was just a wheeny bit photo-shopped and the novel just ever so slightly self-published. Plus he paid late in dodgy cash then jacked in on staying the full 4 weeks as agreed. Genevieve sent a text to her friend on the Mail not saying even half of this, only that he’d not paid. She couldn’t have been more restrained. But horror of horror, she hadn’t sent it to her friend on the Mail, she’d sent it to the implausible tenant himself – who’d snapped back, ‘How disappointing!’

We did breathing and focused on fashion and hair. After half an hour the whole episode had been forgotten.

Then we had to get through to Buckingham Palace. ‘This footage of her in a green coat with a fur hat… is the hat fake?’ BP couldn’t confirm. There was nobody there who knew, not in the whole Palace. ‘We’re running as fake,’ I say, with all of Dainty Lady TV leaning at my back. ‘I hope you’ll back us up if anyone complains.’ The cameras were advancing towards me already. ‘We’ve asked everybody here,’ BP go, getting a bit plaintive. ‘It’s so shiny. We all think it must be fake.’ So the entire ensemble of Dainty Lady TV and all of Buckingham Palace were peering at that footage, trying to decide.

The piece, when finished, was lovely beyond compare – because of fur.

No, It’s Not Real Mink

Tuesday 6th December 2016

I needed a faux brass button and some upholstery braid, known as gimp.  My Zara Limited Edition Hussar jacket (doing very well this season although a fluff-collector so sticky-rolled every hour: in line for Christmas Day outfit) was found to be absent one cuff button after the Cornish visit. Gimp required for 19th century Gustavian stool bought in Gloucestershire for a fortune, but needing horrible bandage-like ‘raw linen’ cover replaced. The sellers of the stool were something else. So luxury shower gel, mohair bed throw, pale grey vintage home-hotel.

So I set off for the West End, Barnet Lawson then Button Queen in Marylebone. Barnet Lawson is a braid and trimming dungeon in Little Portland Street, last visited by me at least 18 years ago. Would it still be there? Surely such a important outlet was turned into flats years ago?  I rounded the corner of Little Portland Street. A barren sense of no trimmings pervaded. Once, 18 years ago, I entered sideways between soaring shelves in the Barnet Lawson vault and wondered if braid and trimmings might not subsume me in a kind of Indian finality, like a pyre. It would have been a good Fate for one such as me.

I went the length and breadth of Little Portland… no sign of Barnet Lawson, only Polish builders unloading. Had they demolished BL just that minute? Then – sudden flash – through the boiler suits of the Poles – there it was! Still there. Just not as remembered, hence not recognised. Oh the mercy! Barnet Lawson still there. And within the same terrifying Cockney crows, rasping away, repelling all braid-seekers, unless deeply serious. But I managed to match and order.

So on to Button Queen. What would have become of that? Also swep away, turned into flattis or a cup cake outlet? But no, still there, even with a strip light and dingy scuffed paint work. And one brass button a near-enough match for the Zara – the right size at least.

Altogether an important morning.

Later Genevieve Suzy read out from the memoir of Alexandra Shulman at dinner. You think of Anna Wintour, her matching pair. But A. Shulman’s boiler breaks down, the pipes in Harry’s room don’t work; her family aren’t wild about her sausage casserole; she goes shopping to cheer herself up (a bad idea, she says) and buys three cotton print frocks the same or similar, dreaming of summer in winter, and has a philosophical passage on the meaning of shopping , which is that the imagination is in play at purchase, imagining exactly the weather, place, time of year where the item will flourish . I like Alexandra on the page, where she is best.When I sat next to her at dinner, she was weary. She had on a satin puff-ball skirt which had evidently been day-wear. It was marked.  Racelette Boyish, we hear, has been asked to review A.Shulman’s memoir but says she can’t because it isn’t as good as her own.

Zara Limited Edition Hussar Jacket: Can be Worn Indoors and at Table

Button Queen, Thank you! As good a Match as Can be Hoped for. You can See the Fluff Problem with this Garment from this Graph

19th Century Gustavian Stool: Bought Instead of Tuscany. Gimp Yet to Go On

Sunday 4th December 2016

Lulu was given at the ENO but might as well not have been. Finn Magnus, the hot boy doc, attended and was enormously comforting as always. Rufus Pitman entirely superseded Lulu with his remarks. He described a bear weekend near Barcelona. The bears were terribly boring. In many cases, their parts had been entirely obliterated by their overhanging embonpoint. ‘What makes a bear?’ Rufus enquired of one: ‘Kilos and hair,’ was the solemn Germanic reply. We met a musician of some fame who was dressed in the style of Rick Owens: i.e. draped and semi-skirted. ‘There should be a universal mother-service,’ Rufus remarked. ‘You employ someone to stop you going out of the house in the wrong frock. Or better, to stop other people.’

The next day was Rudi Patterson again: you remember him? He sat in a council flat in Notting Hill for years producing memory-paintings of his Jamaican homeland while hardly anyone took any notice. In the 60s, he was fashion model in the King’s Road. Hot pants. Royston King is the executor and has organised numerous sales of his archive. I went mad and bought a Van Gogh by Rudi in a gilt frame, plus one of red Caribbean flowers and another of a tin church in Jamaica. The exhibition was given at the Black Cultural Archive, Windrush Square, Brixton. I caused outrage by asking why a lady present is called Novelette. ‘All black people have to have fancy names,’ Royston said.  I said, ‘Novel’ would have been better. ‘It’s her name,’ another lady, white, said, outraged. She had planned, as a retirement project, to work her way round the world as a ship’s mate but got the time of year wrong so had to pay.

That weekend I went to Robbie Gateshead’s party. He is an Earls Court gay who has grown human. One of the guests had had half his ear bitten off by his best mate the weekend before. This was a scene from straight life. Robbie is currently lodged in Australia but over for his birthday. In Australia he appears to be working, which is odd because he’s corporate and ought to have given up by now. ‘Well, about half a million,’ he said impish. Money is as much fun as sex.

Genevieve Suzy: Timeless Elegance and Power

Friday 2nd December 2016

I flung open my home twice for intimate dinners. Angus Willis recalled his visit to Japan. You know that all the houses there are made of paper. I suppose if you put a foot through the wall, you just get another piece and glue it on. I wish they’d do a TV prog on How to Run a Japanese House made of Paper. This is a real lack in the schedules and the Nation gasps for knowledge of paper-house life. Anyway, Angus was put up in such a house, with the parents of friends never met before – fully Japanese people, always bowing and not a word of English of course. A futon was rolled out in a paper room right next to theirs and Angus was put to bed, as these parents bowed their way out backwards. It might have been jet-lag or general strangeness but Angus wasn’t too sure where he was. His dreams were fitful. In one of them he appeared to be toilet-ing – and woke to find it wasn’t a dream. He’d wet the futon! What to do? What agony – in a country rigid with politeness, in a paper-house with the unknown Japanese hosts just a sheet of paper away. The last place ideal for wetting the bed surely. What of the paper? What if it got soaked? The entire paper residence could dissolve into an unattractive nitrogenous heap. Frantically Angus manoeuvred the futon to a balcony. The danger of waking the parents was intense. In the morning he had to engage in protracted bowing and foot work to restrain them from rolling up the futon as tradition requires.

The menu for this dinner was mandoline-cut fennel with orange, lamb with saffron and aubergine and dreary old apple purée. My mandoline work isn’t what it ought to have been and some guests found their slices too thick to eat.

The second dinner was attended by Robert Nevil. One might as well have invited a tank or Mik-47 to dinner. ‘I had chicken last night,’ he snapped, watching me struggle with Poulet au Fromage. ‘You went all the way to Ludlow to get this,’ he withered of my new antiques. ‘Why are there other guests?,’ he barked. ‘I won’t want them.’  ‘Why are you wearing pyjama bottoms?He meant my Topman check slacks. Genevieve Suzy arrived in that top that is somehow a solid slab of power. ‘Would you mind moving?’ she said to Robert Nevil, and he fell off his chair onto the floor. Later eight and a half bottles were found to have been consumed by seven guests. Genevieve said she wasn’t to be asked questions and she wasn’t warm enough. The menu was No first course, Poulet au Fromage, cheese course, some sort of French bread/cake borders apple thing (a bit boring, but at least self-made: my recipes all came from an old book, The Cuisine of the Rose). Robert Nevil threw his Poulet au Fromage thigh onto my plate in retaliation for me getting a bit of his breast off his. I hadn’t got any breast and wanted to test it for moistness. This was before Robert Nevil fell on the floor. Peter Wildwire, our old uni (as we must now call it) friend, also dining, explained that his youngest son has been suffering from a groin injury since August. This is the result of vigorous activity with an older Lesbian up the Holloway Road. Apparently a slightly different explanation is offered to his grandparents. Both his sons are fearfully sporty and fearfully injured – practically have to be pushed round in bath chairs.

Thursday November 24th 2016

I’ve retreated from the World and into antiques. Suddenly my drawing room came right. I over-ordered antiques but it all turned out right. More of that later.

The Gay Mother and I increasingly are relics. I know not the World now but it’s very worrying. There seem to be so many who are Just About Managing. I fear revolution. I do wonder what counts as Just About Managing. Surely unless you’ve got at least 10 million, rock solid in stocks, plus town and country residence owned outright, you’re Just About Managing. If you have a job, you could be sacked. Nobody can really live off a salary.

Have you noticed Donald Trump’s decor? Does it remind you of anybody? I don’t mean Saddam Hussein but closer to home? And the personality? …. classic Poor Little Rich Gay at the extreme end, don’t you think?  Too lacking in caution to be Earls’ Court. Random, without boundaries, contrary, chronically un-normal, borderline disordered – oh yes, a Poor Little Rich Gay. All very well on TV but at the Maison Blanc – I don’t think so. No Poor Little Rich Gay could behave properly for long enough to be President of the United States.

So on that fateful morning, Royston King and I went up from the Royal Academy to Sotheby’s to preview the David Bowie sale. Nobody looks their best, dead, and their wares laid out in an auction house, even if it’s Sotheby’s or Christie’s. It didn’t help that I’m against anything modern at the moment. Royston interviewed David Bowie (when he was alive) and said he couldn’t have been more charming. But his collections were a rat-bag – bit of this, bit of that, none of it very lovely. Awful modern furniture and china. Suddenly a Tintoretto. I know nothing about David Bowie but many Gays say he helped them to be Gay although he wasn’t Gay himself.

The next day I left London to buy antiques, wrapped privately and alone in my Official Car and fragile rich world. Returning via Ludlow where I had an ideal zero-calorie seafood lunch, I was back on my sofa by the Friday evening. Still on the sofa the next evening, Anthony Mottram, consultant of Prague, from 1970, on and off, my abiding companion, suddenly was texting: I was watching the Mandela film, his viewing was The Festival of Remembrance at the Albert Hall: ‘The regiment is very much a family,’ he goes, quoting presumably. ‘Lovely Cyrus,’ he goes. I am mystified. Does he mean Cyrus Vance? ‘It is a terrible orgy of grief,’ he goes. ‘I say get over it.’ It becomes harder and harder to grasp the Mandela film, especially with the accents. ‘There is a need to feel…’ Anthony Mottram grows contradictory.  ‘…ultimate prayce… Abayde with me.’ But then back:  ‘Ghastly religious nonsense now… Bishop in orange hat…. Sovereign lady unstinting, unswerving all her peoples….’ ‘Is she there?’ I go. ‘Very,’ he goes. ‘The entayre famly.’ Then it’s ‘For all the saints. Are you singing with?’ ‘No,’ I go, ‘Mandela is in a phone box.’ I switch over. They’ve progressed to ‘Jerusalem’. My spelling (such as it is) evap from emotion. ‘Gorgeous,’ Anthony Mottram goes. ‘And did those… Duvayne…Fab… May boe.’ Now there are Prayers. AM remembers privately those of our families who have gone on before. ‘But Mrs Bone is still with,’ I go, ‘although confused. Also Vera,’ I say, the mother of Anthony Mottram. ‘I can feel her fading,’ Anthony goes. ‘She may not last another year.’ Vera is 96. But the longer they go on, the worse it is. I am sad for Vera. AM knows perfectly well that Mrs Bone hasn’t passed. But we both see Her, in black, turning to leave her box.

Thus 46 years of togetherness, bickering, nonsense and carry-on. Will posterity know the glory of it, the revolution, horror and greatness?

David Bowie Sale: the Multis Have Got a Whole Set of These: Chris Ofili

Horrid: Reminded me of Gay Mother’s Green Bakelite Picnic Set: It is George J. Sowden ‘Potato’ Serving Tray. Estimate was £150. I Should Hope So Too

David Bowie Junk : Norman Catherine (!!!) Fanagalo Store. Name Recalls Firbank’s General Susan. Estimate was £10,000 to £15,000

David Bowie: Sofa Horror: Peter Shire ‘Big Sur’ Sofa, Est £3000 to £5000

At Last Something Nayce: A Cedric Morris

Friday 18th November 2016

I lunched with Carole Vaux at Ottolenghi the Monday before last. She is very finished and had come up from her Buckinghamshire palais (neighbour: Fern Britton) for a night in her London pied a terre. ‘I only brought one outfit,’ she said. So when a little dish of dun-coloured salsa dropped to the floor as it was being delivered to some nearby diners and splatted all over Carole, it was a catastrophe. I’ve not heard from her since. She’s not particularly an Ottolenghi devotee either nor a huge fan of pastes and emulsifying in general – so it’s even worse. She will never go to Ottolenghi again. Her husband is called Harold: at the outset, in the 80s, he had just a lock-up in East Finchley. Now he rules the world of retirement-home-building at the tasteful end. Massive salary: Laura Malcolm found out what it was from online enquiry. Not quite equalling her own dear husband’s, of course, nor Smallmeal, head of landfill in this country.

The next day Sir Royland Strong gave a lecture at the Commonwealth Institute on Shakespeare’s Gardens. It was about the build-up over 300 years to the creation of the Shakespeare Garden at Stratford in the 1920s but really about the quest for the true Elizabethan garden. The old dear had diamond earrings and was awfully charming if inaudible. Some in the audience claimed to have heard nothing at all – but they were the sort that would. In fact you could hear most words, especially the really grand bits where he said it was all perfectly ghastly and what did they think there were doing – but there you are. Or when he pretended not to know which Beatle had owned Friar Park. This was the only time Royston King interrupted, to no avail. There was a good run of audibility when he was saying that the garden at Levens Hall was not original Elizabethan at all, but much altered over the centuries.

After that it was off to bed to wake up at 3a.m. to find Sir Donland Trump winning America. So my vision of the world ruled by two ladies – Mrs Clinton and Mrs Merkl  – in little spongy trouser suits shattered. What will become of us now?  At Lulu this gone Monday I was thinking: they could abolish the opera. It would be replaced by a whole lot of bogus gilt furniture populated by sex pests and their mail-order ‘wives’.  (Lulu was a bit of a trial, by the way, unfort).

Everyone was totally shattered at the Private Breakfast at the Royal Academy the next morning. All the rich old things had been up all night without admitting it. Art helped though. We had a private tour of the Expressionist Exhib – having been to the Private View already, of course. So now it was a chance to look at the pictures. I don’t know – the Expressionists were more than usually off their heads and quite tremendous. They were mad keen on suicide and dying in car crashes and making the most incredible stipulations in their Wills. Clyfford Still was my fav. He stipulated so violently in his Will, his work wasn’t seen for 30 years. Really they’re pictures of the Rocky Mountains in different colours and very big.

Aunt Lavinia, leaving, confided that she was going that afternoon to look at a new new dog called Winnie. We now hear that Winnie is a huge success. ‘She’s very ugly,’ Aunt Lavinia says but very charming. I don’t know if I mentioned that the previous new dog had to go back, owing to attacking other dogs especially if small. Genevieve Suzy was furious with Aunt Lavinia and couldn’t bear that the old new dog only had such a brief spell in Chelsea/Fulham borders before going back to kennels and possibly death.

Tuesday 15th November 2016

Robert Nevil gave a dinner to mark my return to the Capital after my Cornish absence. ‘I’ve invited others because you complained that it was so boring with just me.’ I’m never bored, Robert Nevil,’ I said, ‘just hurt.’  One hurt is being banned from Robert Nevil’s dinners. The guests are always fearfully blue-stocking and I’m not considered suitable. Too noisy and silly. That was what I complained about but as often with Robert Nevil his version is different. Anyway, at least I was admitted.

The menu was from a book of Persian cooking condemned by Joshua Baring as ‘rather poor.’ The beetroot starter was excellent. In fact I was ‘I must have that recipe’ like the Stepford Wives. The chicken main was also excellent and there were even seconds. I can’t remember the pudding but there must have been one. Miss Mina gave a vernissage at her house round the corner just before Robert Nevil’s dinner. She’d found out the menu. Robert Nevil said she always does. But some mean possessive people in her square don’t want to share their menus with Miss Mina. I have say I’ve no patience with those who don’t give and give.

The other guests turned out to be predominantly Indian, including our own special treasured mini doc, Arjan Bose, although it was not certain he would appear until he did. We learned a lot more about goings-on in Calcutta: for instance the other Indian guest, as a schoolboy, took a bus to his mother’s office where he was to be shown off. But on arrival he was found to be semen-stained. ‘He’s covered in semen,’ the secretary shrieked. In the mad crush of the bus an older man had been trying to grope him. But that the crone had gone to the full extent did not emerge until it was too late. This sort of thing is normal in Cal, apparently. Robert Nevil and I agreed afterwards that Indian society is the most bizarre mixture of don’t-give-a-damn and a preoccupation with what the neighbours might think bordering on insanity.

On the following Tuesday I was on the red carpet: the world premiere at Leicester Square Odeon of The Crown. I wore my Topman frock coat in tartan, bought for the Scottish visit in May. Utter heaven, The Crown. It’s all about her, and incredibly good. The agony and greatness of Royalty. Embalmers were in the King’s bedroom the minute he was dead. Princess Margaret had to fight through their tubes for her last farewell. This may not have actually happened but revealed a truth all the same – how Royalty have nothing really. Even your own father’s body is not yours but at once taken over by procedures in the national interest.

We were bused round to the after-party in an hotel in Holborn. We met Princess Margaret and the Queen and the King and two Private Secretaries: Princess Margaret kissed us. Then it turned out her agent is a friend of Sebastian Archer’s – so, as always, connected. Genevieve Suzy visibly heightened into the Anna Wintour de nos jours. Later she danced with Jared Harris, who played the King. ‘Marvellous coughing,’ I said to him. He was dying, you see. Dreadful coughing. He said he made himself ill with it, which was a bit backwards, although believable. Normally you’re coughing because you’re ill. The man standing next to him looked familiar. ‘Were you in it?’ I asked. It turned out he was the Head of Netflix and had made a speech from the stage before the premiere. That’s why he looked familiar. He actually seemed a bit apologetic he hadn’t been in it.

Matt Smith played the Duke of Edinburgh. He went round the party bent into a permanent pre-hug shape so he could dock readily when necessary which was the entire time. He appeared to have lost the power of speech. Whenever a star came near – I couldn’t make it out at first – it was as if the air was suddenly whirring with knives but really it was the jabbing elbows and handbags of those who must get near.

Everyone in the film world is incredibly good-looking, whatever their task. But it’s a dangerous world somehow.  I found out later that Jared Harris is the son of Richard Harris, the film star, with whom Beamish O’Halloran of the Mail  used to sit in that low-down pub next to the Savoy (R.Harris had a perm suite in the Savoy) stirring up trouble.

Going Up the Red Carpet: the Premiere of The Crown

The Cast on Stage: The Premiere of The Crown: Stephen Daldry was Known to Me Before he Got Huge

After-Cars: the Film World always at Limo Level

Sir Andrew Neil at the World Premiere After-Party for The Crown

Sir Alan Yentob: at the After-Party for the World Prem of The Crown

Princess Margaret: her Dress was by Emilia Wickstead

Sir Mattland Smith

Saturday 12th November 2016

The Churches are marvellous: St Enodoc the best, where Betj is buried. It’s on the sand dunes near the sea. But you have to cross a golf course to get to it. There’s no road. Some other trippers shouted at the Gay Mother and I across the fairway, as I believe it’s called: ‘Were you thinking of waiting?’ But we couldn’t see, because of a bush, that some players were about to ‘drive off’. Lucky though, for we might have been hit. I said to those others who had shouted, when at last we did cross, ‘Shall we move their balls?’ for they’d landed right there in our path. Didn’t go down well. I’ve no patience with Golf and those who play it.

But St Enodoc was heaven. So ancient and knarled somehow, with its primitive spire. You could feel the past there even if it had gone from the hotel. Tiny little hutch, for two generations buried beneath the sand, even now in a pit. The vicar had to be let in through a hole in the roof when it was buried to keep in going as sacred with a service once a year. To think that Debo and all the others would have been in there for Betj’s ral.

St Endellion is a smarter church not well positioned – dreary site. It’s given to festivals and that kind of thing. But gloriously flat and spreading with no coloured glass and many windows not high up. Airy, light and old – crooked pillars, craggy floor, ancient wood, white walls. Our final church was St Merryn. That had steps down into it. More creamy and vaulted than St Endellion, it had the same first class horizontal energy, low clear windows and simple plain stone and painted wall contrast.

We went to Rick Stein’s Seafood Restaurant, the top one of his rack of places at Padstow. So London re-styled at vast expense to give a light fishing-village feel. The apple pudding was the best – an apple done in lurid green jelly with actual apple inside. Quel art! We went to Trerice – enchanting National Trust home – Elizabethan. Incredibly manoir like a toy. In the shop there was a book, ‘Great Families of Cornwall.’ We know them all, of course. I was at school with the present Sir Rashleigh – they’ve got Menabilly back now from Daphne du Maurier and live there, you know. The Carew-Poles, the Bolithos, the Foxes – all known.

Back at the hotel, the Gay Mother talked in the dining room about the pheasant menace and other estate matters. Really it is us who are the past now. All around white, not quite Express-reading Britain dined. Girls in private school, not the best, 4×4 in car park not a BMW. They were all getting ahead in a modest way, having sprung from suburban streets and little conversation at ‘meals’. No genteel ladies on full-pension, no military, no evident battery of solicitors, doctors and stock-brokers. The only abiding feature – no black faces.

Cornwall is marvellous but I don’t like it. I’ve said it before: it’s creepy. Maybe it’s all the pirates and the smuggling and the Celtic past and always being out on a peninsula cut off from everything: and then the strange disembodied, shiftless sea-side holiday existence. The names are odd. People in Cornwall – well, you always feel they might be arranging a curse. It’s a relief to get back across the border into our own dear county.

Betj’s Grave at St Enodoc

St Enodoc: Enchanting: Primitive, Buried

St Enodoc: the Setting

St Enodoc: Within: Debo would Have Been Here

St Endellion

St Endellion Within

St Endellion: Within: Wood, White and Stone

St Merryn: More Sunk Down than St Endellion: Only Lit from One Side

St Merryn: Similiar View Looking Down the Church as Looking Up towards the Atlar

Rick Stein: Apple Pudding

Horrid Rokkes Blak: Usual Cornish Cliffs near Trevose

Trevose Lighthouse, Last Visited early 60s: Not as Remembered Except White and Size: But Remembered in Different Place

Bore-Hole at Trebone: Terror’s Source in Childhood; Again Remembered but in Different Place and Different Dynamic in Relation to Surroundings

Creepy Cornwall

Trerice: Charming Toy Manoir

Friday 11th November 2016

‘Have you ever stayed here before?’ they asked when I was booking over the telephone. ‘Well, yes, in about 1961,’ I said. The Gay Mother and I were going back to the Cornish hotel where we had our annual summer holiday – for years and years, an unvarying routine, I thought, but now the Gay Mother is saying maybe it was only three or four times. I was dressed by Marks and Spencer. Little elasticated shorts in navy or brown. Stripy aertex tops. Footwear I don’t recall probably because I didn’t like shoes in childhood and was always kicking them awff.

The hotel’s carried on being there all this time. The drawing room was mainly pink with potted palms.  Oh yes, I knew a Palm Court all right, even if only six and never having seen another. Big swing doors had mirrored glass panels and gleaming brass handles. We never sat in there (children not welcome, I assume). Is that why it’s the only room in the hotel I vividly remember – or think I do?  We passed through the drawing room into the dining room where I can picture the bay window beside which the ice cream incident took place. Suddenly the waitress from Latin parts slammed off into the kitchen and came back with the strawberry ice cream in the battered metal cup. The Gay Parents had been adamant: I was not to have another scoop. A scene had been raging for quite some time. There were so many things not allowed: no classical portico to be added to the front of our house: no jetty running down to the river, commandeering the public part; the pump house was not to be swept away, no yacht was to be moored. No go-cart even. No Scaleletrix.  The Latin waitress must have overheard the wrangling and taken matters into her own hands. But there was a feeling of rebuke in her gesture, even though the Gay Parents were wrong-footed.

We stopped going to that hotel after the sand-in-the-sandwiches episode. At tea on the beach the sandwiches provided by the hotel were found to contain nothing but sand. I can picture one of the Gay Parents peeling back the bread to reveal the merest tinge of butter (that lost post-War art of thinnest possible butter spreading for sandwiches) and …sand. So that was it. We never went back there again, nor to Cornwall, for holidays. The Gay Mother doesn’t remember any of this.

So 55 years later, the Gay Mother and I gained the hotel at lunchtime. We ordered lunch in what must have been that drawing room, the Palm Court. But nothing remained. It was the same hotel, you could tell that. But the past was gone completely. Not a trace left.

The Drawing Room of the Hotel: the Past Quite Gone: Those Must be the Same Doors as Remembered from 55 Years Ago But They Might as Well Not Be