Thursday 25th April 2013

Where does the time go? I’ve been back from the Côte for weeks but in blog land I’m still there.

Last Friday Genevieve Suzy of the magazine world came round to my home; she doesn’t know if she can go on with Hastings, where she’s got one of the best houses. The renovations are killing her. I said she should only desist if one of the best houses in Hastings was not her absolute object which of course it is. Lesser considerations such wise investment of funds should be swept aside. Genevieve had champagne in her handbag; at 55 minutes notice, I managed Heston’s lapsang smoked salmon on toasted pain de mie and an improvised smoked tomato sauce for spagetti.

Then on Saturday Robert Nevil gave a talk to the Colchester Pony Club – more later. Perfectly astonishing. In the ’30s the Club had socialistic tendencies and after the War did innovative things with glass – oh yes! the hidden depths of the Pony Club!

But I must round up the Côte: we took a bus trip to Aix en Provence. The guide soon grasped that Val was an authority. Before a statue of a grim-looking medieval woman she had to defer. ‘Margaret of Anjou,’ Val proclaimed. ‘The She-Wolf of France.!’ Grasps from the crowd at the racism! Never such thrill. ‘Just to think. All this could have been ours.’ Val swept Aix. Marg of Anjou married Henry VI of England who was intermittently insane allowing his Queen an entry into the power world where she mongered ferociously. However, overplaying her hand in the Wars of the Roses, she ended up getting posted back to France to live as a poor relation of the King – so not quite in a position to lay claim to Aix.

Val surged on through Aix – ‘Look at that giant order,’ he warbled, so grand and commanding. See graph below if you’re so wretched you don’t know what an order is.

At Cézanne’s studio, I graphed his old macs until told to desist. Actual items seen in the paintings were on view, such as vases and a plaster statue of an upright baby, unremarkable until placed in the furnace of Cézanne’s imagination. The whole room grey as the artist required – a neutral background for colour to flourish. Huge window to the north but no outlook.

Later we bused to Mont St Victoire much painted by Cézanne.  To graph it without telephone wires it was necessary to take over someone’s garden. The owner expressed surprise but not displeasure. A thoroughly sinister mountain, huge, a bare limestone spur of mysterious colour thrusting out of an otherwise not mountainous and green landscape.

How to place Cézanne? A heavyweight, of Old Master stature now, obscure in his day, the smaller the scale the more powerful the result. Les Grand Baigneurs just trying too hard. Not quite Poor Little Rich Gay but a vast improvement on Van Gogh.

Well done, Cézanne, for bashing on and becoming one of the great artists of all time.

‘Look at that giant order!’ Val warbled: Aix en Provence

Aix en Provence: Quite Nice Old Town

Aix en Provence: Street Adornment

Cézanne’s Old Macs: Cézanne’s Studio, Aix en Provence

Cézanne’s Still Life Items: Cézanne’s studio Aix en Provence

Mont St Victoire, With Telephone Wires After All

Tuesday 23rd April 2013

With great sadness I record the death of Virgil Grayson, world-renowned architect and also marvellous gardener, this gone Saturday. He was 75. First known to me in the late 70s, he was a remarkable beacon, inspiration and haven in those far-off days. Here was experimentation and bold living without fuss and tiresome belligerence. His self-designed home was a revelation, a large London terraced house in the Belsize district, but with all the floors moved about and the back of the building sliced off entirely and replaced by glass panels. When his then-partner returned to America, the farewell party was ferried in stretch-limos through the November night – from the disused laundry room of the Trellick Tower (important Arno Goldfinger design), where oysters were served from the drums of the washing machines, to a mews in South Kensington for an outdoor display of drag and finally, at dawn’s crack, to freezing Hampstead Heath. It was an astonishing public carnival in the time when Gays had only just been found to be legal.

Virgil was gentle and welcoming and tolerant. Although twenty years older, he always seemed young and never claimed to know better. He bore, of course, a core of steel. How else were the buildings to be got exactly right. ‘I can’t put my name to that window,’ I heard him saying to a somewhat cowed assistant in his office. Not all could grasp the message which lies at the core of Poor Little Rich Gay life: nothing but perfection will do. Sometimes wine glasses near Virgil exploded spontaneously from the determination of it all.

Yet Virgil encouraged and helped a whole generation of younger architects, most notably our own dear Bruce MacBain, my private architect, and precious Archie Armitage. He began us all, as owners, in houses. Without him we would never have had a clue nor become what we afterwards became.

When a builder announced that my first home, at Savage Gardens, Portobello Road, was about to fall down and, having hacked off all the rendering and removed the bathroom roof, refused to continue work, Virgil was enormously kind, lunched at once (I did a greengage tart from Jane Grigson), reassured and provided a surveyor from his office as well as a team of delightful Irish builders to take over . In those days one was too fraught with money-worries ever to be properly grateful, I fear.

More recently we have enjoyed spells at Virgil’s house-and-garden Côte-side paradise on the Côte, near which I sadly passed on Sunday 7th April in a taxi ferrying Val and I from our cruise ship at St Tropez to Toulon-Hyères airport, whence we boarded for London.

Tuesday 16th April 2013

The first day on board the Krystal Quest I underwent a Press Conference with Randy Azurental, CEO of Completely Fantastic Club Cruises. Val, meanwhile, lay down in the state room. After that we were destination emersed in Sète, which is a remote fishing village on the Camargue’s edge with a sea-water canal running through its middle.

Canal through town – so Venice, Venice naturally. Sète another Venice!

Val and I made a bee-line for the cemetery, half-way up a hill on the town’s edge. Many tombs with own front door, shrunken chapels crammed, where last member of the family alive, should money have run out, might conveniently lodge until the final call. Some famous dead present. We hunt for hours for grave of Paul Valèry, much signalled, but apparently end of the rainbow effect, signs just took us round and round in a loop. At last we said, ‘Who was Paul Valèry anyway?’ A famous crooner also buried. Sasha Distell? No, Georges Brassons. But we gave up hope. Val v. up with Georges Brassons, me, Adrian Edge, not.

Many tombs in interesting state of decay.

In the evening we huddled on a specially erected luxury seating stand beside that canal I mentioned before – in the Venice part of Sète. Some local men and boys, mostly quite fat, were taking their clothes off in the street. The Mayor was present. It was far from warm but not raining. Cruising greatnesses had come ashore. There were even New York Greatnessess in good black wool capes, looking sixty, only the true ninety when moving, rather like the latter-day Nancy Reagan, who at her husband’s funeral looked years younger than as First Lady twenty years before – except when in motion.

Strange row-boats were on the water. The stout men and boys, now changed into nautical white, were on board.  On the extended raised stern of each vessel stood one of the men or boys armed with a long pole. Suddenly the opposing boats were being rowed violently towards each other to the accompaniment of reedy medieval drum-rolls produced by onboard musicians. The two aloft with their poles prepared for action, stood square, with knees bent and pole horizontal. As the argosies were upon one another,  the boys at the rear veered their poles, with metal ends, directly at one another. Flimsy wooden shields were their only protection against being run through entirely.  But how easy to miss and take out an eye? Or a brain? Death was not the object, however, merely to push. The pole was to push against only the left side of the wooden shield, the right was against the rules. Rules! He who pushed the hardest biffed the other into the water. Within seconds it was over. What an ejaculation! Either both still standing or one plunged into the freezing water. Then a limp period while they re-grouped for another bout, ten seconds of drama, poles wavering, man in the water or not and so it went on.

This is the water-jousting of Sète, unique to that town.

My nerves couldn’t stand it. Thank God it was over. I thought to see blood in the water, catastrophe at any moment.  But the cruisers were reeling at the hilarity and quaintness. Returning to the ship via a champagne reception in the dockyard, the New York Greatness said, ‘You don’t see anything like that in New York.’

Recovered in the state room, though, Val and I took a different view. This was the real thing, oddly enough. The slight drear of the town contributed. The men and boys of Sète showed their water-jousting, with no japes or carry-on for tourists but just as it is. It’s their sport.

Sète Graveyard: Simone Annibal was Loved by All, I’m sure

Sète Graveyard

Sète: The Venice-like Setting for the Jousting

They Prepare to Joust

Le Grand Moment de Bataille

Dans L’Eau

The General Scene

Saturday 13th April 2013

I’ve been wielding a bucket of Flash – hugely cleansing and therapeutic. The sense of clean insides to the kitchen cupboards knocks you down when you enter that room, as well as the now toothbrushed push-in buttons of the washing machine and dishwasher.

But Val and I began our cruise in Barcelona a week ago last Friday. Since, concerning the death of Mossis Thotcher, Val has massively re-bottled and sends abusive texts every two hours. She ruined his life, you see. In some way it was particularly in her mind that he should not have a pension.

But a week ago last Friday we were all right. In Barcelona we slogged up the Ramblas – not liked by us. Trashy, touristic – and then for miles and miles uphill on foot to see the Sagrada Familia (or Sag Fam) which is a cathedral by that Art Nouveau architect, Gaudi.

Well, it was covered in scaffolding and builders, we couldn’t get in because of the queues and it still isn’t finished. Why? I’ve had enough of the Sag Fam not being finished. If you can’t finish a building after a hundred years, you might ask yourself, ‘Do I really want to finish it?’ You might ask yourself: ‘Is lack of drive associated with under-lying doubts about finished product?’

It’s not even that big.

I will concede, there’s nothing like it. In its own terms, if you want a building to look organic and curvaceous like Nature, it succeeds. But oh the hideous concrete finish! Not even clean grey, but browny-orange. Nasty.

Val and I clucked away from the Sag Fam. We saw a few contemporary design shops and one kitchen shop called ‘Gay’. At one time Poor Little Rich Gays went on about Barcelona as the place for a mini-break to the extent that one was determined never to darken its doors. You were supposed to be able to get the most marvellous contemporary design items there. It’s a nice enough town, if you like a Spanish town of the 19th cent mainly with no top class museums. We found another cathedral. Val said, ‘At least it’s finished. Shall we go in?’ But it was 6 euros and close to the facade looked fake, or massively restored.

We couldn’t be bothered.

I prefered to lay down in the cruise ship.

Get it Finished: The Sag Fam in Barcelona

Quite Nice CasaPupo Style Fruit Lumps on the Sag Fam at Barcelona

Sure Sign of a Design Hotel: Barcelona

Kitchen Shop called ‘Gay’`: Barcelona

Catalan National Theatre, Barcelona: Our Fav Building

Foyer of Catalan National Theatre: Fab Foyer: Perhaps No Need to See Show in Original Catalan

Barcelona Other Cathedral: At Least Finished: But Insubstantial and Nasty Texture

Monday 8th April 2013

I interrupt my Riviera Cruise to mark the passing of this extraordinary figure.

You must phone the Multis at once. This is the worse day for them.

What to think? What to think? Robert Nevil is being vitriolic. Texts are pouring in from all over the world. Peter Acharya is cruising near Saigon and texting in. But, no, I won’t engage in the much loved anti-Thatcherism of the chattering classes.

Her downfall was inevitable but her drama, verging at times on madness, was thrilling. Never will I forget her explaining to Russell Harty how she kept her bows crisp with tissue paper.  Those were the bows of her blouses. Her defence of the Government in the afternoon, after she had announced her resignation in the morning and which I watched live in its entirety on TV, was the most riveting television the House of Commons has ever known, both ludicrous and magnificent.

Her greatest moment was her  rentré into the Conference Hall after the Brighton Bomb, where she showed a Roman essence of leadership.

She had no sense of humour and no small talk. She got more and more bossy and unhinged. About to mount a tank to be graphed by journalists, she said, ‘Will it jerk me off?’ There was a strange kind of innocence and alarming simplicity of vision. She may have meant no harm. Did she do harm? Would the changes that she brought about have happened anyway, in a rather more diluted and less divisive form? It is easy to forget that she appealed initially, before her shoulders reached Alexis Colby dimensions, across the class divide to the aspirations of the upper working and lower middle class. She led, essentially, although disguised as a Majesty, a Lower Middle Class revolution.  Revulsion over endless, increasingly obstructive and pointless strikes, equally pointless State subsidy, appallingly inefficient and disobliging public services (does anyone remember that it was virtually impossible to get a new telephone line before privatisation) was what swept her to power.

Poor Little Rich Gays of course have inside information. In the early days after she ceased to be Prime Minister she took rather to drink. I once saw her on TV looking a dead ringer for Doll Teardrop with whore-like rouge botches and wild, wrecked hair. Not known at all is that at this time she was discovered by an aide at 3 in the morning, in the kitchenette of the office she had established in some back street near the House of Commons, vigorously scrubbing out the inside of a tea-pot.

When her memoir was published she undertook a publicity tour of unbelievable proportions. She never discussed anything with the Publicity Director but the business in hand (bottled water had to be British).  Except once she said, ‘That’s a very nice suit you’re wearing, dear. Tell me, did it come with those buttons or did you put them on yourself?’

Val has this moment texted in his response to the demise of Mossis Thotcher. It is: ‘Just rejoice.’

Mossis Thotcher, who died today…

Saturday 6^th April 2013 (on board the Krystal Quest)

We’re building up for the President’s dinner in Acqualina. We’re moored off Cannes. Randy Azurental and his beautiful wife, Poni (6 foot Louboutins), are to receive us.  Acqualina is top-end, done in boudoir powder-blue with white trim and crystal aspects. Otherwise there’s Prime C, mahogany and red for a steakhouse feel, where we’ve dined twice, once, amazingly on a paying basis; that was to see Chateau d’If from the window as we passed last night, whence Monte Cristo’s Count escaped. Otherwise we’re in Windows Café with six types of bacon, the patisserie selection hovered over by American ladies, wildly abandoning their sticks as they load up, the magnificent cheese lawn, the cured fish counter, the sugarless options, supplemented by crushed chicken in breadcrumbs (‘It seems quite entire to me,’ Val said, trying it.) and the waffle and pancake hatch.

What a limitless range!

Only Discoveries has alluded us so far. That’s the main restaurant on Deck 5. Val wants to try the Astral Spa for deep re-allignment but will probably take a lecture on the history of Aix and Avignon instead. We’ve already had the Michael Bublé tribute  and ‘Danzare to Dance’, a cabaret of which we took 15 minutes.  Tonight is ‘All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go,’ given by the Cruise Director, who starred in a lovely musical, ‘Gilbert and Sullivan’, in London’s West End.

Claris from Australian Vogue has sought us out. She’s wild for ‘All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go’. On the tender back from Cannes this morning, I was trying to convey facts about Câp Ferrat but she and Val were busy singing show tunes. Malcontents on board are homing in on us, singing show tunes and telling us about people on shore they know who play for our team.

I’m to wear velvet to the President’s Dinner. There’s a room full of slot machines and roulette wheels. The average income on board is supposed to be $250,000 but really…. I’ll say no more. Many of the husbands have sadly passed, or are even deceased. ‘My husband is deceased,’ a breakfasting lady said this morning.

We spend hours studying literature offering options. We’re furious to be missing the Bridge tour with Captain Ball.

I’ve never been more exhausted in years.

Our Cruise Ship Moored off Cannes and Listing, if You Ask Me

Mosaic Café on Board The ‘Krystal Quest’: English Country House Style

Just a Little Mark on the Sheet: Stateroom Challenges on board the ‘Krystal Q

Valance Management a Challenge: Stateroom aboard the ‘Krystal Quest’

Thursday 4^th April 2013

We’re on board. We’re cruising in the Med. Not on a paying basis.

Val’s here with me and we’re sharing a stateroom. It’s an American boat, just like a block of flats, only it moves. The cabin doesn’t have a porthole. It has a picture window and a balcony. You think you’re in a reasonable enough standard issue 4 star chain hotel type room until you look out of the window and all the neighbour buildings are moving off into the distance.

We’ve had a welcome reception, a welcome dinner and a deeply uplifting address from Randy Azurental, whose core differential is destination emersion. At present we’re being immersed in Sète which means looking at some quayside flats’ blocks in knicker pink from our stateroom.

On waking, Val said, ‘I could face some segments.’ He meant fruit segments, of course. Val is causing a sensation at the breakfast buffet. ‘Throw that coffee overboard, if I were you,’ he bellowed at the helpless Philipino waitress.  Then he conducted a run-down of the early Kings of Provence or whoever and their connection to the Holy Roman Emperors. American ladies of a certain age are hurling themselves at him.  We met a gyne who introduced her husband: ‘He’s a dick doc. Between us we cover from here to here.’ She indicated the area between the waist and the upper thigh. ‘Ah, nienti di syphilis,’ Val cried later for some reason. I think it was because the lady gyne’s story about the elderly man with a flagging penis that been given new possibilities through artifice in some manner only imaginable in America had a happy ending. A number of ladies in a care home, taking pity on the inadequate member, had consented to relations then got gonorrhea. But not syphilis…or anything worse.

Monday 1st April 2013

Two more weeks of this cold! Lord! the outfit challenge! Just how many woolly cardies is one expected to have.

I forgot to mention re: Sandringham St Kil, where I was last weekend with Joshua Baring, Jesus and Patrick Lockyer. Joshua’s dinner service was given him by Mercia Cunningham-Connaught, who once had a TV series. Secondly, Joshua said to Jesus, ‘Your glasses have got to go.’ Jesus just said, ‘I love my glasses.’ Jesus is now in Berlin, Patrick in Brighton.

Here are some graphs: Harry Rollo’s chiropractor’s waiting room and the Photo Multi’s footwear for Easter Day plus their Easter cake.

What Harry Rollo Saw in the Waiting Room of his Chiropractor in Los Angeles

Easter Parade: The Photo Multi’s Easter Day Footwear: Prada Factory Shop, Montevarchi, Italy

The Multis’ Easter Cake

Sunday 31st March 2013 (Easter Day)

He is Risen!

Lord Arrowby, my former part-time love interest, has texted in Latin. Laura Malcolm feels the ecstasy in distant Normandy. Poor Robert Nevil texts: ‘His blood may be streaming from the firmament but my …unmentionable.. is streaming from my nose.’

Oh dear!

Let’s hope the wonder of it penetrates soon. Easter is the very heart of Poor Little Rich Gay life. No ghastly baby and tinselly kiddies. But the Risen Lord. Perfectly impossible. Just wouldn’t die. The guards at the tomb were scared out of their wits by the resurgence. Yes, yes, yes! It’s the fight against Death. Renew the wardrobe, in with the Spring modes, out with the Winter,  moisturise the face, renovate and restore the home, work on stains, the tiling module, the configuration of the staircase, weave and shape the restaurant bookings, the Glyndebourne tickets, weave with money or just your wits. Never, never does the Poor Little Rich Gay give in. On and on she fights.

Other people are another matter. Things and reservations are more manageable. Poor Little Rich Gays are difficult, difficult, difficult. They will not yield. They will not be seduced. Feuds, as we know, go on for years.  My own feud with Anthony Mottram, ‘consultant’ of Prague, is now in its third year. The Risen Lord gives hope. Poor Little Rich Gays do not destroy but remain impossible. They will not be gooey nor indulge in relationship therapy but they do not utterly destroy.

Saturday 30th March 2013 (Easter Saturday)

Robert Nevil sent a Good Friday text: ‘Jesus died for you – the silly-billy.’

Let’s hope warmer weather will improve Robert Nevil’s mood.

He died but he rose again.

In the meantime: my Chinese soldier got knocked down the other day and his arm was smashed. I thought poor Libby Purves’ dead son’s disturbed diary as dramatised on the radio in the afternoon would make a good background for the glueing back together. At each attempt the shards just disappeared inside the soldier. Tilt him for five minutes back and forth to get them out. Libby’s son descends further into darkness. Glue again. Snap.  A piece is rattling round the soldier’s hollow interior. Tilt. Out it comes. Libby’s son really bad. Near death. Again I glue. Again snap, then tilt. Libby’s son gone.

The only hope to fill the soldier with that expanding foam stuff to give support, pare the broken pieces down so they’ll fit, glue together, then fill the gaps with Milliput (a modelling clay), sand, then re-paint the damaged areas.

The costs were only about £20 and several visits to the handy shop. All the paints were in stock fortunately ( mean in my home stock room). But the soldier was a present from Aunt Lavinia, priced £7.50 from the British Museum shop.

I’m reeling from the result. You’ve just never know. How did I get the colours right? What a miracle! There’s a ground of grey with a wash of terracotta over the top.

What an Easter story!

May Poor Little Rich Gays here and throughout the world, heal and reconcile without gooeyness or anything resembling relationship-therapy jargon and with the full promise of remaining impossible.

Modelling Clay Ready for Sanding

Partially Sanded

Fully Sanded and with the Ground Colour On

Finished! With The Terracotta Wash over the Ground Colour

In Full: My Chinese Soldier