Friday 9th August 2013

And so… at last… the boarding for Tuscany. The Multis have already mounted the air for Rome, the advance party to open the villa tomorrow afternoon. 1st week in the Multi villa at Montevarchi, convenient for the Prada Factory Shop, as well the warmth and tenderness of the Multis, of course. 2nd week self-villa near Pienza.

Outfits have slid into my suitcase with ease. Only toiletries to go. My world shrunk to a suitcase. Smooth so far and pre-boarding tension not raging. But sock editing went badly. One black foot-covering missing from a new pair. Where could it be? Maddening.

On the other hand, I did manage to re-shoe-lace those Prada clucks. So will have fresh shoe-laces with unfrayed ends for Tuscany.

But my perfumes not to board. Apart from 10ml phial of Isfarkand by Ormonde Jayne. These niche perfumes must not get hot. In previous years Tuscany has wrecked some Creed Green Irish Tweed and an entire bottle of Escentric Molecules.

In fact, it’s been a struggle to get my fumes through this gone heatwave. After a massive battle with Les Senteurs to get them to replace my Sel Marin by Heeney which had lost its efficacy, NOT through exposure to high temp, I then had to molly-coodle it through the furnace. In a drawer, in its box, in my drawing room on the ground floor (oven in my top floor bedroom and bathroom) was the only hope.

Do you know, I’m not sure this bottle isn’t dud too. Despite the most careful preservation. It hasn’t gone off, so not heat damaged. It just doesn’t last.

No I’m through with Sel Marin by Heeney. Come the Autumn I shall re-structure my economy to gain some Geranium pour Homme by Frederic Malle. They do it in travel-sized small phials. So convenient, less expensive (only £60) and less likely to go awff.

A truly poisonous perfume as well.

I’ve just heard: The Photo Multi’s suitcase did NOT gain Rome. It won’t arrive until tomorrow.

My World Shrunk: Two Weeks of Outfits in One Box: By the Way, I’m Reviving the Summer Scarf for Tuscany

Sel Marin by Heeney in its Box in Drawer in Drawing Room, Safe from Heat But Still Not Efficacious for Reasons Not Clear: No Lasting Power: Not Good Enough for £120 a Bottle

Creed, Green Irish Tweed in Drawing Room Drawer for Protection During Heatwave: An Absolutely Reliable Niche Perfume: Hideous Price

Thursday 8th August 2013

Saturday: Tuscany. The struggle begins to make Tuscany anew for this year. We’re planning Lucca, as a novelty.

Pre-boarding tension as always. I’ve just realised  – my Prada heavyweight clucks I got re-soled in time. But forgot about the laces. They’re frayed. Too late now to re-lace. My Tuscan laces will be frayed.

But everything packed or worn as a travel outfit must be perfect. I can trim the laces with nail scissors. Even dip in clear nail varnish. Could be an airport waiting activity.

My Tuscan wardrobe will feature absence. I’ve thrown away a number of short-sleeved summer shirts and not replaced them.

The only new items will be a Balenciaga black polyester T-shirt with complicated cross-banding (it’s what you pay for) and some Zara off-white polyester slacks that got stained but came up lovely after dunking in red wine Stain Devil and washing at 30c. Thank you, Zara, for not wrecking my life.

The Prada Factory Shop looms. Oh the shimmering excitement. Will there be anything in ivory to go with my Paul and Joe salmon slacks? Lovely slacks but very difficult to team. Crave ivory.

Must also look ahead to the autumn wardrobe. All my Topman trash is being housed at the cleaners – paid for, but left there until September. Just no room in the home for it.

But I supposed to be on food.

The Signature Poor Little Rich Gay dish for this gone Season was the Cold Vegetable Scatter with Tarragon dressing, created and launched by Laura Malcolm at her May dinner. Beans, broad beans, peas and asparagus (Waitrose Essential frozen baby broad beans are ALL RIGHT). Put masses of chopped tarragon in your dressing.

Otherwise I have revived Summer classics for comfort OR I have invented or re-created restaurant dishes – a new departure for me. Never before have I not been recipe-based – hard as it is to concentrate for long enough to follow a recipe. Or nerves take over.

Summer classics have included: Agneau Printanter, given at the dinner for Joshua Baring at which he fell out with Jesus. Jesus has still not forgiven, which isn’t like him. Apricot Fool, Gooseberry Fool, Hazelnut Meringue Cake, Corrie Chicken for Glyndebourniana, Tarte a l’oignon.

Invented dishes or recreated from restaurant memory: when Reggie Cresswell dined with Harry Rollo, Valèry Duplessis, Conrad Matheson and Bruce MacBain I revived the Omelette Cake, possibly made in Tuscany in 1977 or possibly figment of the imagination. It was all right but a bit harsh. Don’t use tinned tomatoes for the sauce next time. Fresh better. Try to get a bit of foam in the omelette layers. Not the full soufflé omelette but they should be lighter.

In Tuscany, I’ll re-attempt the omelette cake.

For Glyndebourniana I invented a redcurrant sauce for duck. Poor colour because of flour in sauce. Also concentrated flavour of redcurrant doesn’t come through from a purée. Next time use redcurrant jelly and rosemary. Don’t cook breasts on a rack. Place directly on tin and hope to get something from which to make a glaze with red wine. No need for flour thickening. Accept it a bit wet.

My best recreation without recipe was for the Lady Carmichael (mother of the Blond Multi) dinner at the beginning of July. Slow-cooked shoulder of lamb with baked aubergine pieces and a saffron sauce with whole chickpeas. I had it at Petersham Nurseries (restaurant in garden centre with gravel floor) on an outing with Harry Rollo to Ham House. But will I be able to do it again? Can’t quite remember the method.

It’ll never be the same again.

But there we are.

Monday 5th August 2013

The Multis closed Glyndebourniana on Saturday with their 4th Glyndebourniana. Saturday is the trek to Tuscany in search of gold. They took Glyndebourniana with the Blond Multi’s former business partner who is Norweyan and knits Norweyan jumpers as well as being a multi in her own right. It’s very doubtful whether the Blond Multi embraces opera. He’d rather be at Wembley with George Michael. But there we are. Glyndebourniana is a calling that all must hear.

The Multis have made themselves gloriously known. Everywhere they appear with champagne, even at a student art show where they established a Bollinger corner. Prince Dmitri Hersov reckons their monthly champagne output is £400 min.

With the Prince I visited the new Multi country branch, a Kentish farm house with 32 derelict acres to be renovated for a year. From it we went to Sissinghurst where the Photo Multi nearly brought down the National Trust: he made the Blond Multi stand in the border, right amongst the plants, to be graphed.

Never, never has such sacrilege been known at Sissinghurst.

In the library there’s a new policy – they’ve put a sofa and visitors are allowed to lounge on it to get the full Vita and Harold experience. But when the Blond Multi picked up a nearby priceless bibelot, an alarm went off.

The Blond Multi’s bought a shop. He is seeking retail advice. ‘What do residents in the area want?’ I said. ‘Something horrendous I’m not going to give them,’ he said. We envisage an all-day restaurant/cafe service of complete brilliance, style to be decided. Residents will flock. At present the shop is an empty shell, not even toiletted.

Oh the Multis allow themselves to be fully known. Their boundaries bound without limit. On Friday, the Blond Multi lunched me at Zucca in Bermondsey Street after our session of retail therapy  – I mean I inspected the retail premises, so beyond retail therapy in actually providing the retail. Arriving before him, I managed to get the table changed before he did. At Glyndebourniana the previous Saturday, for Figaro, the Photo Multi ordered the picnic table moved into the sun at the beginning of the long interval.

‘When you wake in the night,’ the Blond Multi whispered to me recently (we both are wracked by insomnia), ‘do you start worrying?’ He seemed to think this a terrible thing to confess. But both Multis are looking ravishing at the moment and have a new policy of meeting new younger Gays on whose terraces they take champagne (their own). On that Sissinghurst visit the Multis soothed my own bleeding wound of three and a half years as few others have done.

Saturday 3rd August 2013

This time next week will have gained Tuscany. Chance to begin afresh! Or ‘Afresh! Afresh! Afresh!’ as Largs said.

So many fragments – I forgot to say that Rocky Goldrock and Lansdowne Reindorp have been repatriated from Palm Beach after ten years. Lansdowne is to pursue banking duties in The City. If you go along the Bayswater Road in a bus (unlikely) you can see their kitchen tap at a certain point on the first floor of an imposing flats’ block.  Sit on top of bus for best view. Rocky’s self-designed stationery is now available in 200 stores across the USA. He will fly back and forth to tend the business. They dined with Ralph Kitto at my home. I forgot to mention that Rocky declared Zara and Topman highly credible. We agreed the high-end designers dull and finished. Quel change! Some years ago, when it emerged that a Gay had spent £70 on swimming trunks (when £70 was a sum of money), Rocky pronounced, ‘Well, it’s a whole outfit.’

Rocky, who’s some hunk, was looking hot in Gap white jeans, figure-hugging.

I’ve remembered at last what Harry Rollo said about his mother’s Chinese millionaire friend. She is a bit of a ringer for Nancy Lam, the TV cook.  When she’s on (Nancy, that is), they’re always having to cut to adverts in a hurry because of her awful language on mid-morning live telly. Sebastian Archer, partner of Robert Nevil, who used to occupy a massive executive position in the Pony Club, once went to see Nancy re: her being given a complimentary pony for publicity purposes. She approached with meat cleaver, saying, ‘Pony no use to me.’ Well, Harry Rollo’s mother’s Chinese millionaire friend also has hatchet way of talking and has cleaved the human race into two halves, either ‘genius’ or ‘moron’, both rapped out with contempt.

Some weeks ago Val texted, possibly while lightly sauced: he’d been viewing a programme about cruises. You may remember we went on a cruise in April on a non-paying basis. At one point in the cruise programme a couple fulfilled a cherished wish to renew their vows on board. Val said, ‘What was missing from our cruise was that we didn’t renew our vows. Mine to kill a Tory. Yours to kill the Pussies.’

I said to Val, ‘But I killed the Pussies years ago. Look at them now. They’ve both on Prozac.’ Recently in Chipping Camden Val had a chance to run over Sam Cam but missed it.

Don’t forget the new Poor Little Rich Gay Campaign: ‘Val for the Lords’

On Monday we’ll have news of the Multis, before going on to practical affairs: the preservation of perfumes in hot weather, gardening and summer menus.

Thursday 1st August 2013

August! Dread month. And still in London. The Queen has already gained Balmoral and will be having those awful brown Scottish scones.

Robert Nevil has been heard of. Did you see? He has made a comment on the previous bulletin. Meanwhile in-fighting in the Pony Club is worse than ever. Already quite a few owners have parked their ponies in stalls belonging to other, more important ponies. There’s been pinching of rosettes and underhand snipping of manes and tails. The long list for the prestigious Betty Trotter Prize has been announced: ‘If you’re not an Afghan breed, don’t bother,’ a bitter owner quipped.

Meanwhile Robert Nevil is quietly bottling cucumbers in Bulgaria.

In July I gave five dinners. I’m planning a food bulletin, as well as gardening and how to manage perfumes in hot weather.

But must get people out of the way first. People are so much more troublesome than things.

At the foot of the entrance stairs for Harry Rollo’s after perf party was Lord Arrowby, my former part-time love interest, in confab with the previously unknown hostess, a classic London greatness, married into one of the great families. ‘What do you do?’ the Greatness was asking Lord Arrowby. ‘I work for the Government,’ he said. ‘No, no, he writes down everything they say.’ ‘No, I don’t,’ said Lord Arrowby. ‘Yes, you do,’ I said. ‘And what about you?’ said the Greatness, turning to me, rather desperate. ‘Lord Arrowby runs the country,’ I said. ‘Adrian Edge is Governess to the Oppenheimer children,’ Lord Arrowby said. ‘No, I’m not,’ I said. ‘I think I’ll leave you to work out who you are,’ the Greatness said.

Who are we indeed? Unquestionably something and not ordinary members of public.

Later Lord Arrowby came over and actually leant on my shoulder. He’d been mauled by a poet. ‘Is your poetry angry or calm?’ he’d asked, trying to be nice. ‘How do you run the country?’ the poet reposted. ‘In an angry or calm way?’ Actually this poet was in a tiny bit of eau chaud for writing poison pen letters during an important Pony Club election (being also in the Pony Club). But poor wounded Lord Arrowby didn’t know that.

A film star was there but we’ve had that already. Harry Rollo made many brilliant remarks as he did when dining with me a week or so before.

Otherwise at my dinners: most recently Ed Jasper, the bed linen expert, arrived and said he’d got to leave, had no stamina, would lose his temper at any moment. Surveying my tray of Ottolenghi stuffed chicken thighs, he said, ‘How long’s that going to take to cook?’ ’25 minutes,’ I said. ‘Give it longer. Get it in now.’ Luckily he took to Genevieve Suzy of the magazine world, who was wearing a raspberry lace coat over a turquoise Pucci print frock. She said that when Andrew Marr was editor of the Independent he used to say things like, ‘I’ve seen a lovely picture of a Native American Indian for the front page.’

So Ed Jasper was won over and cried when he had to leave at self-imposed ten o’clock.

At one of the previous dinners with Ralph Kitto, Peter Acharya revealed that pashminas can make you impotent. He had a bit of a spat with Ralph about RBS. Stephen Hester’s PA is very intimate with Peter. Ralph told of the trouble of lending one’s artworks to museums. The carriers cart them down the street uncovered ,in the rain. The Damien Hirst medicine cupboard came back with the plastic containers of pills in the wrong places.

Now what about Doreen Lawrence being made a Peeress? Val, keen on a drop, brilliant cutter on the bias, has always sought ennoblement.  Isn’t this his cue to leap forward?

Monday 29th July 2013

So much has passed. It’s been a bit frantic because the Gay Mother suffered a flood. A pipe burst in her roof at 2 in the morning a week ago Friday. I dashed down last Wednesday after Rheingold on Monday and Die Walkure on Tuesday. Vac-ed and dusted the Gay Mother’s home for 36 hours. Begged her to buy a Mr Henry. Am going to be vac-ing and dusting there for some months to come, I can tell you. Ceilings down, Aga out, carpets ruined.

Really the home’s a killer. You can die of a home. Virgil Grayson finally succumbed, he died of his home, from the asbestos, having devoted his life to building great homes as well as other buildings. The Memorial was in Oxford yesterday but I couldn’t go because of Glyndebourniana.

So Friday, back from the Gay Mother’s with her in person. She said, ‘I can still remember all my wedding presents and who gave them.’ She’d previously been vigorously pruning a mahonia at the old family mansion, not her own home.  Aunt Lavinia, also visiting the mansion from London, said, ‘There was nothing I could do to stop her at 89.’ The Gay Mother has now declared that she doesn’t want to read any more about Queen Victoria.

Saturday seven dined (the Gay Mother told Giles Ullerston, one of whose clients is a very leading Tudor novelist, that she didn’t want to read any more about the Tudors). Yesterday five, including the Gay Mother,  took a full scale Glyndebourniana picnic.

So now I’ve run out of napkins. When you think about it, Glyndebourniana is very DIY. You have to hack off a corner of your home and transport it to Sussex, drag it across Glyndebourniana lawns, fight for a prime location at the ha-ha’s edge, self-set up. That lawn is full of people reduced to pulling down fold-up table legs themselves.

And it’s supposed to be so grand.

But Figaro was superb. The Gay Mother said tartly, on the lawn, after the Multis’, me, Adrian Edge and Prince Dmitri had laden the table with silver and glass and antique china, ‘We must remember why we’re here.’. Last time at Glyndebourniana, in late June in freezing gale, a man stopped to graph us dining with the silver and glass. I was a little glaring then I thought, ‘He’s probably the Chairman of Shell.’ Honour to be graphed by such a one.

What a week for opera! I doubt it will be known to me again in my life: Barenboim Ring utterly thrilling and words cannot begin to hold a torch – even though there were extraordinary goings-on on stage, fully visible: Nina Stemme forgot her words, began in the wrong place, clung on to Barenboim’s railing and seemed to implore from him some direction. Nothing doing. Several times, Baren muttered to the singers mid-perf. Some in the audience were saying there’d been no rehearsal – well, there can’t have been much. I couldn’t get Baren’s style of conducting. It was surely bizarre. At the end of Act 11, he and the Leader of the Orch hissed and spat at each other in full view. Perhaps they thought there was no-one there.

Despite, or perhaps because of, it was utterly utterly marvellous. Nina, who seemed to know no words, was the best Brunnhilde ever. Then yesterday The Figaro was marvellous, in a different way.

We mustn’t forget Harry Rollo’s after-party. A film-star client of Bruce McBain’s was there. I said, ‘You know Bruce McBain, I believe.’ Now she’s reported back to Bruce McBain. She’s wild for Harry Rollo. Poor Lord Arrowby, anyway shattered by the burden of the State, was mauled by a poet. Finn Magnus, the hot boy doc, was in an exquisite pink tailored shorts outfit. He’d flown in from the Caribbean that morning and was flying out again the next morning for Barcelona. Other youth were present, not met by me.

Nor must we fail in our memory of Robert Nevil, still not returned from Bulgaria. It’s rumoured that his hair has been rinsed the classic Bulgarian beetroot  and he’s planning to open a cucumber bottling factory in deepest Bulgaria, all profits to the orphans.

The Gay Mother’s Wow-Factor for Glyndebourniana; Bag Embroidered by Her Grandmother

Tuesday 23rd July 2013

Oh Great Day of Days!

Last night Rufus Pitman took me to Das Rheingold, given by Barenboim at the Proms. Words fail utterly. Our seats were as good as on the stage. Fafner (or is it Fasholt?) was only three feet away WEARING THE ACTUAL RING.

The Ring itself was only three feet away.

As you know, The Ring is the great Poor Little Rich Gay work because it’s about the yearning for a really lovely home and the trouble arising therefrom. Wotan craves Valhalla and massively over-mortgages to acquire. Awful consequences.

Then in the middle of it all The Royal Baby was born. We could see Barenboim muttering to the performers. The music rolled on of course.  But, instead of the ascent to Valhalla at the end, they did a Progress of the Royal Baby. A stage baby (that’s a real baby from a stage family: Thora Hird was such a baby) was brought on and held aloft in triumph by Fricka.

You’ve never seen the like: completely national yet international at the same time. Not a dry eye. All united in glory, rich and poor, Greatnesses such as Rufus Pitman and even, for the occasion, may I say it, myself, Adrian Edge, all low feelings forgotten, subsumed in great democratic embrace with ordinary members of the public.

Where would we be without the Royal Albert Hall.

The Royal Baby is to be called Prince Lady to avoid sexism. If it had a boy’s name, girls would feel excluded. So this is the solution.

Back to Harry Rollo’s great after-party tomorrow and how poor Lord Arrowby, the weary God, just like Wotan, rested for a moment on my shoulder before resuming running the country.

Monday 22nd July 2013

Yes, Harry Rollo, tending more and more towards music, shattered the world once again with his performance at the London Bowl. Not all the performances, in fact, were of Harry’s devising, although dear, darling Guy Bostock, who was said by Lord Arrowby at Lord Arrowby’s party to be fated to expand in muscularity indefinitely, thought otherwise.

The first performance was like a huge piece of Meccano, with many angles, commanded by Harry to turn in on itself or tend in severely contrasting directions without ever falling apart or wrenching or lurching. A balancing act, really, daring and thrilling. The second perf was children dropping stones into a well, but other echoes never heard before. But Rufus Pitman said it was as if contrived by Mrs Thatcher and by the end the forces of oppression had been overcome and people could open their own businesses. To me, it was more like bunches of flowers opening while someone almost had a nervous breakdown.

Then there was Harry’s own presentation. Absolutely massive. Really I can’t do better than repeat the critic in one of the great National newspapers, who said, ‘A near-hysterical intensity, expressed through mad hyper-complexity or glacial stillness’. The subject was Death and there was no comfort yet it was Art.

Well, now I’ve got to leave for Das Riengold (sorry, no time for spelling) with Rufus Pitman….

Come back later for the After-party and Lord Arrowby, my former part-time love interest, at the foot of the Greatness’s stairs. The last thing he had said to me previously was, ‘Now you’re leaving me.’ Said plaintively. True, Robert Nevil was there too. We were departing his party which apparently continued into the next day, with one or two of the less experienced guests requiring the attention of Finn Magnus, the fab boy doc, who was conveniently at hand.

Anyway we bickered fabulously in front of the Greatness and later Lord Arrowby got mauled by a poet.

Saturday 20th July 2013

Wednesday morning I was at Laura Malcolm and Matt Driver’s chateau fragment in Normandy, with Esmé Manning who was in Heidi Hi. Wednesday evening I was at the London Bowl for Harry Rollo’s great performance and afterwards in a Notting Hill mansion for the after-party.

That Norman chateau fragment – well, now there are three bathrooms and five bedrooms: the more I think about it Laura Malcolm and Matt Driver have revealed a brilliantly new Poor Little Rich Gay mode, one where there is lavishment, Farrow and Ball, aching detail, yet the life is flung wide open. Three times the chateau fragment has been renovated, extended and restored. Perfect judgement, no hint of the hotel, still a feeling of age and charm; just the right door handles, at least a week in the sourcing, also the floor tiles, more like six weeks. But once the work is completed, the home is launched to fend for itself. No manic vac-ing, no polishing and placing. The home is free. It wheels delightfully. Who cares if the odd spider is caught in its wings? Smell is so important in a home and this one does not smell. Bed linen is fresh, toilets wholesome. In my own home, there’s a crisis if one fragment of a leaf blows in. Lower middle class, some might say.

Matt Driver is now a consultant. He works from home and puts up curtain poles in between phone calls. Very precise with the drill. Placing of poles perfect. Also perfect his planting of a lavender hedge in the garden. I’ve never seen such a sight. Usually there are holes in lavender hedges where some of the plants have died. Not this one. Matt has got the distance between plants exactly right. In between drilling, he makes phone calls. ‘I want to see more people crossing the Channel without cars,’ he says. Or, ‘Washing up brushes are finished.’ His line of business is branding.

In the evenings we watched Upstairs, Downstairs. At last, at last Laura has acquired a full boxed set. Esmé knew all the script writers of course. I should mention that she appears in the most famous TV comedy moment of all time, when a man standing at a bar falls over as if he were a statue, rigid from head to toe. Now Esmé has got a lift-and-separate bra and a terrible reaction to mosquito bites. She was up all night bathing her swellings which were six inches across. But she can put across any song in the right style, exuding talent and is absolutely gimlet re: food. As far as I’m concerned she’s crushed cold salmon forever: ‘Too dense. Must always be hot.’ Also she said, brand not important re: coffee but must be Arabica. I never knew that. Don’t know what Arabica means.

So, Up/Down in the evenings. How we roared! Such a worry when Mr Bellamy got too far from a wall because, Esmé informed, the actor could never remember his lines and had to have them pinned within sight. Terrifying moment, when he was standing right in the middle of the hall, miles from any wall, while Hudson swore eternal loyalty to the Bellamy family for the thousandth time before bringing on the sherry. Look of panic in Mr B’s eyes.  ‘She seems to be wearing four frocks,’ said Esmé of Aunt Prue, who came round to tea after her sister, Lady Bellamy, had gone down in the Titanic. ‘Since Arthur died and Connie got married, my days have been awfully empty,’ she said pointedly, giving the impression that she would come to tea every day until Mr Bellamy proposed. Her hat was an extraordinary lacquered affair, more of a giant shoe placed on the head.

I said to Ivy Driver, the daughter of Matt and Laura, ‘We’ve been having Up/Down after dinner in Normandy every summer since you were about eight. Now you’ve eighteen. And we’ve barely scratched the surface.’

Acres and acres of epis to come!

Look, I’ve left no space for the other great height of that day; the London bowl and Harry Rollo’s perf before thousands, praised to the skies by all the papers the next day. And the after-party in a mansion.

It’ll have to wait until tomorrow.

The Norman Chateau Fragment with New Precision Lavender Hedge by Matt Driver

Miraculous Lavender Hedge by Matt Driver to Enhance Norman Desmesne

Chocolate Cake Run Up by Laura and Esmé from Back of Packet of Poudre de Sucre for Matt Driver’s Birthday on Monday

19th July 2013

No blog today – was called upon to broadcast to the Nation and Commonwealth. Was shown in left profile talking to Heather (in pink jacket) and Asha (in a young outfit). Lovely background of live London – panorama.

Great highs to speak of – Harry Rollo’s perf at the London Bowl – earth-shattering. He tends more and more towards music. Has coupled now successfully with great traditions. The after-party, Lord Arrowby at the foot of the stairs. He was later mauled by a poet.

I haven’t finished with Normandy and all that Upstairs, Downstairs wonder.

Such glory!