Saturday 20th September 2014

So … I was saying, before Genevieve Suzy insisted on immediate departure for a pub, it’s all rather sudden. I went round Bruce MacBain’s gaffe on Thursday and we had telly on. His telly is so advanced it betrayed the sheen of moisture on most participants. During the breaks they were evidently dried off a bit. The BBC Scotland lady’s frock stood up well to the gruelling 8-hour shift. I wonder if she planned a springy uncreasing fabric or was lucky. We waited up for the first result. Who would have thought there was such a place as Clackmannonshire? It went ‘Nu’ and Scottish BBC lady was surprised. But Nick Robinson and others had somehow got inside information. They seemed to know what the result would be. We slept fitfully, but assured, deep down, that Our Nation would be saved. At six I got BBC News on my phone and yes! It was ‘nu’ overwhelmingly. We went downstairs in the Bruce MacBain residence and powered up the mega-telly. The really maddening thing was there was only one result to come, from ‘Highlands Council’. It was delayed massively but no explanation forthcoming, not even mentioned. Huw and his friends went gassing on and on and cutting to people like the PM making earth-shattering announcements from Ning Street, but the real story, what one was itching to know – why was Highlands so delayed, how many had voted, what was projected etc – passed over completely. How could they have made such an idiotic mistake? I tried to phone the BBC to make my point.

Now it seems we’re to have an English parliament. I don’t think it’s been much spoken of until now. Wilfred Hyde White should certainly be in it, as well as Joyce Grenfell. I wonder who else? Val, but  really he wants the House of Lords. There should be a member for the WI. Robert Nevil could represent the Pony Club of Great Britain (English branch). Tennis, flower-arranging, bird-watching and getting ducklings across busy roads will surely feature hugely, not to mention poultry-keeping and wildflowers. Debate will be ferocious. I wonder if Members will display self-made jams on certain days. Robert Nevil will be in his element with his bullace preserve (inedible). RN foraged before foraging had been invented. Bullaces are a kind of sloe, a fruit of the hedgerow popular with some birds but not all.

Will Members knit or crochet on the benches?

Friday 19th September 2014

Very pale and shattered but intact: Genevieve Suzy insists that we must be at the Venue at once. I’m to struggle into my outfit for Angus Willis’s Home Store Evening Dinner opening. I’m to be double Balenciaga  BUT there’s a hole in my Balenciaga cardy – on this day of all days.

I suspect Nationalist subterfuge.

On Bruce McBain’s telly the definition was so high: all the Referendum people had a sheen, were moist.

We stayed up all night.

Wednesday 17th September 2014

Tomorrow is the day. I’m to go to Bruce McBain’s in the evening and remain until the result is given. On Monday we attended the Rally in Trafalgar Square. If only the ‘No’ campaign had struck a similar note throughout. There are two things: the Scots have ruled our country anyway since the Union. Secondly we don’t like Nationalism. Poor Little Rich Gays prefer the complex suspension of different identities under one flag which itself has no brutal adherence to fixed parameters. The British do not insist on a culture. This is why Spag Bol has become so important. Bruce gave me a ‘Stay Together’ flag to wave. He deeply doesn’t want independence but gets furious about it being called ‘The Bank of England’.

One could see the point of Sir Bobland Geldoff in Trafalgar Square. He dined at Angus Willis’s Hastings Home Store. I’m sure I mentioned it. So did Diane Abbott. We go there on Friday to open the Evening Service – if we have a country left by then. Sir Bobland can address Trafalgar Square in a suitably rabble-rousing manner yet put across more thoughtful ideas at the same time. Also Eddie Izzard. Dan Snow was more one-dimensional but fair enough.

On Friday Lord Arrowby attended with me the final instalment of the Tudor play ‘Bring Up the Bodies’. His mac was a dream, the purest shade of azuro aeronauntico and what shape!  But he didn’t know the label. We had to peer inside, with him in it. He, of course, is working behind the scenes at this time of national crisis.  But the threat to the Royal Vauxhall Tavern is terrible. Developers loom. Lord Arrowby will make it his life’s work to save the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. His favourite character in the play was the really slutty French manservant of Sir Thomas Cromwell, whose talk is filthy.  We considered going round to the stage door. But didn’t. A skiing party is planned for the skiing season. I’ve never tried skiing. I believe some are killed. But maybe I won’t be used after all.  We enjoyed the second instalment of the play less than the first. No drama. No development. What was happening to Sir Thomas Cromwell?

Robert Nevil and I were just the two of us on Sunday night. We are agreed that Oscar Pistorius got the right verdict and poured over nursery catalogues. We didn’t even have telly on. It turns out that Robert Nevil grows Wallflower Apricot Twist. If it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me. On 3rd or 4th October we go to the Plant Fair at Great Dixter. Let’s hope someone will have Wallflower Apricot Twist to give my garden an orange lift early in the season next year.

Sir Danland Snow at the ‘Let’s Stay Together’ Rally in Trafalgar Square on Monday 15th September 2014

Flag-Waving: I Waved this Flag in a Small Way

Friday 12th September 2014

So much yet to come. On 1st October last year (my birthday) Robert Nevil and I worshipped at Dixter and I vowed to have more flowers in my own garden for the late season, to be more like Dixter.

Here is the result: the new asters are still to flower as is the cimcifuga (as it’s now not called). Next year I’ll hope to have more of the knot-weed like plant with pink tassles on the top, seen at Dixter. It was grown from seed from about June. The annual sunflowers are rather weak because the sun begins to go out of this north-east facing garden from now while the perennial sunflower ‘Lemon Queen’, although it has done very well in only one year, does rather overpower. And I’m not too sure about those giant zinnias, especially the egg yellow one. Several times I’ve been on the verge of pulling it out.

Maybe they’ll be more flower power in a few weeks when those asters buck up and flower. At Dixter two weeks ago the same aster (it’s a raspberry shade) was already flowering in an open, sunny position.

So it’s on to next year. What about rudbeckias? They are so yellow. But maybe they’d do better in semi-shade.

My front area should be making an impact in a week or so once Mina, Tibouchina and Tithonia get underway.

My Late Summer Garden: Coming On

My Late Summer Garden: What do you Think of that Yellow Zinnia?

If Only the Asters Were Out: Maybe They Will be Soon and Then it Will Look Quite Something

Wednesday 10th September 2014

I had thought to have no opinions today but the second pen goes to paper… There’s trouble in the marmalade cupboard. I had it out yesterday morning. Two jars had bad mould on the top but we’re used to that. You skim it off and continue. But the smell persists in the cupboard and in the particular jars, although the marm tastes all right.

Filthy little spores. How to gas them out and not poison the preserve? Do I face being marmalade-less until January?

On Monday I gave a last min din for Bruce McBain’s birthday. The Multis, Angus Willis and Fergus Strachan. Furious arguments broke out every three minutes: taxation, the massacre of small birds in southern Europe, and finally the referendum. It’s very hard for Bruce because he faces re-patriation but all his grandfathers fought in the World Wars for Great Britain and were proud to do so. The menu worked quite well, but the Blond Multi said that if the 1st course is loaded in as bites with drinks – which it was because Angus Willis was in transit from Hastings where he is King and arrived late – it feels more like canapés. Then there were calls for bread with the guinea fowl. If only I’d known I could have shifted tons of potatoes I’ve got in stock from my organic box. But I thought it was no carbs after 8. Finally the Blond Multi said, ‘Is there sweeters?’ So I burrowed in my wine cupboard and found various presents from over the years: grappa, an airline size bottle of port, some buckwheat vodka etc.

Don’t tell anyone, but I don’t like sweeters. Apart from the expense, it’s headachy.

Here’s my top garden at present, giving so much pleasure in these wistful late summer days.

My Top Terrace Garden

My Top Terrace Garden: It’s Wandy and Frondy

My Top Terrace Garden

Sunday 7th September 2014

I am just a little worried. Angus Willis, world food stylist and now King of Hastings, says, ‘Great Dixter: it’s a bloody mess.’ Always I scream and look as if I might fall. Great Dixter the Golden. I won’t hear a word said against it. This year I’ve not been at all. My last visit was on 1st October 2013, my birthday. Robert Nevil and I were wild with enthusiasm. The Multis have taken to going over from their new Kent desmesne almost every week and have, of course, forged straight to the top, drawing Fergus into their photographic orbit no less.

So last Sunday I went alone to Dixter with a French Count who wants ideas for his estate in Brittany. The pot plants by the front door were as garish as ever but one’s used to that. A giant rudbekia of some kind was just a little too dominant, though. We went on into the top garden. I liked the uncompromising fat double sunflowers, grown in a row as if a vegetable. But one of the topiary yews is surely dying, if not dead. The old pear tree also rather beyond romantic. But the overall picture, for it is a picture, carefully composed, however it might appear otherwise, as enchanting as ever. Continuing, huge clumps of daisies and grasses made drama. As always there were plants and shrubs in flower that, despite countless visits, had apparently not been there before. But wasn’t it perhaps all a little brown and autumnal? A lot of the established trees and shrubs looked thin and weary. I couldn’t see the firm groupings of annuals grown for the late season such as had given the feeling of a garden at full throttle on 1st October last year.

The season is to blame, I’m sure. It’s been hot but also humid. There’s a lot of mould and leaf-spotting of various kinds. But I do hope Dixter isn’t short of money. Now that C.Lloyd is gone, has lucrative journalism and lecturing died with him?

‘Unkempt,’ a woman was saying on the lunch lawn. She meant praise. Another lady said, ‘Christopher Lloyd never had any children, did he?’ It was a mystery to her.

Let’s hope and pray for Dixter. Nature’s defects cannot wholly be assuaged by money, though, unless one is entirely indoors and not always then.

Great Dixter: On the Verge

Great Dixter: Not at Its Best

Great Dixter: a Good Vista Here

I do Consider These Plants

It Really Is the Size of a Dinner Plate

The Usual Front Door Display: But What do You Think about That Yellow Daisy?

Another Red Admiral on an Inula at Great Dixter

Thursday 4th September 2014

Just finished a gruelling piece to camera for Dainty Lady TV on my Viking River Cruise in May. No doubt Genevieve Suzy will want it re-done.

Suddenly the Multis’ Café is opening, this very afternoon. From graphs it looks as if one will be inside a honey and vanilla ice cream. That’s the marble. It’s marble-lined. Nothing like it will ever have been seen before, you can be sure of that. Bruce MacBain’s had a hand in it, of course. The Blond Multi has imported many traditional Italian style features, such as the ‘listo prezzo’ on a black board with lettraset letters in white, green and orange. Also those wooden cafe chairs with the curved backs.

I must get there now and make myself comfortable.

From the Café, I go on to the theatre. Wolf Hall. Couldn’t bear the book, so don’t know why I’m bothering. What I really want to see is My Night with Reg. But the thing is Lord Arrowby has agreed to accompany me to BOTH Wolf Hall and the sequel, Bring Up More Bodies, as I believe it’s called. I’m completely reeling.

But I won’t be wearing my new turquoise mac from Prada Factory Shop, Montevarchi, Italy. It’s this season. I’d actually already tried it on in orange in London. Sample, being sold off at quarter price. Not quite the right size, but Cecil Beaton always had his outfits made a size smaller than he actually was. So there.

My New Prada Mac: Put Everything in Outer Wear, If You Do Nothing Else

Tuesday 2nd September 2014

I am reminded: I am yet to show my new turquoise mac from the Prada Factory shop, Montevarchi, Italy.

Saturday and Sunday Prince Dmitri and I were back to back mega-drenched, wracking, nerve-wracking Salome and then Elektra. The reception at the end of both, both given without an interval, was absolutely massive. Never has such soprano power been seen on two successive nights in the Royal Hall. These were unquestionably the greatest nights of the Proms season this year. Of the two, Nina Stemme as Salome was perhaps the more refined and the opera itself, springing as it does from Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, more deeply redolent but Christine Goerke as Elektra recalled the great days of Birgit and even Kirsten. I was myself present at one of Birgit’s last appearances at the Garden when she gave Elektra in a hideous Greek sack-costume (tied and dye, I would say) but with good court shoes. Afterwards, the audience were surprised to find the outside of the Opera House completely black from all the coal (400,000 tons apparently) the great singer had consumed in the course of the perf. Then followed the era of the ‘clean’ nuclear-powered sting-ray soprano. But now at last the coal-fired model is back. Oh Christine Goerke, you are great! We will travel to the ends of the Earth to hear you.

I’m not sure one would want to be Elektra. You can see that her friends might have got rather fed up with her. But at least she hadn’t made it up about Clytemestra, her own mother, doing in her father. The most awful things happened in Ancient Greek times which are less frequent today but on the other hand, Poor Little Rich Gays frequently murder their mothers by hurling better frockage, decor, home and canapés as well as herbaceous borders and just about everything. But this is simultaneously a bid for intense intimacy with the mother. Clytem is more fun – frightful monster but not inhuman. She was sung by Dame Felicity Palmer who is 70 but absolutely booming. Huge voice.

As for Salome, I’ve never known quite what to make of it. Richard Nevil appeared nude in a student production in 1975 – of the play, that is. Don’t think some gays weren’t liberated in the 70s. He was supposed to be a slave boy, full of prophecies. Wilde said the work was profoundly poisonous. I think he meant subversive. Which it is. One is encouraged by the less than cosy depiction of human sexuality. No ghastly handy-holdy kissy-kissy smugness. More: off with his head and snog. But the experience of the opera is one of profound alienation, horror and revulsion. I can’t quite think why anyone would want to see it, let alone again. But we do.

Lord Arrowby’s New Government Look: He didn’t Take the Trousers. He Wants a Spray On Fit

Monday 1st September 2014

The Gay Mother’s got Start of Decade Renewed Energy Syndrome – in this case the start of the 9th decade.

She’s having a hebe heaved out. It does nothing except grow. She’s reducing the Golden Rod in the border – too much yellow. She’s reviving a Frances Bissell recipe for a carrot salad with cumin. Do you remember Frances Bissell? This is the result of her going through all her old recipe clippings. She found another for steak with balsamic, so we had that. Nice. And new.

In the Post Office, the Mistress was speaking against Facebook, email and the Internet. ‘Stay off it,’ she said, with her husband backing her up. ‘I rather like it for some things,though,’ the Gay Mother said. ‘I do like YouTube.’

The Mistress reeled.

While eating the steak with balsamic (really good. And a good use for balsamic which turns food brown if it isn’t brown to begin with), a Red Admiral landed on the Agastache ‘Black Adder’ outside the window. Such an event!

A Red Admiral Outside the Gay Mother’s Kitch Window

Friday 29th August 2014

I don’t know where I’ve been all week. The Multis in Tuscany are making cocktails out of the swimming pool water for economy and some of their villa units have been found in the breakfast area not at breakfast time, recalling the grave offence described by Verily Anderson in ‘The Daughters of Divinity’ of being found in the Sunday Coat Cupboard not on a Sunday. The girl in question was sent to the Headmistress to whom she insisted, Caligula-like, that she was a horse. So she was let off, because anything horsey went down v. well at Normanhurst.

I was going to tell you about the Gay Mother’s plan to remove a hebe but it’ll have to wait. I was with her last weekend.

Val has made an important discovery.

He goes: ‘Did you know that Gandhi was a little bit Scottish? We’ve been saying all these years Mahatma and actually it’s McHatma! Apparently his old Mum was Morag from Dalhousuie. And that was a tropical kilt round his waist!’

Scotland is much in our minds at the moment because it might go independent. Suddenly nearly everything and everybody of importance is being found to be Scottish to try and make them feel more loved and less likely to vote ‘Yes’.

No more has been heard from Val of the titular Abbess of Aleppo and her novices who were one minute crossing the Alps to save Tuscany and the next praying violently in the capella at Gatwick Airport for shrinkage in the delay to the Multis’ plane for Rome – that was two weeks ago. Also its wheel was bad. After 3 hours waiting in the Club First Lounge where they met old business associates by chance who said they longed to die now that they’re retired, the Mults finally boarded. Then the wheel was found to be bad and they had to wait on the tarmac for a replacement to arrive from Valencia. They didn’t gain the Hassler until gone midnight.