Sunday 30th November 2025

Last Saturday I went to Hastings. After Val (lunch in a freezing church hall with Joanna Lumley and the late Lord Bath – more later), I called at the Angus Willis shop. There laid out for sale were the butter knives. Still in stock. A miracle because since the summer the Gay Mother’s second butter knife in this series, bought from Angus Willis a few years ago, has been missing. I’ve had the flatware drawer and all the sink tidies turned out several times – to no avail.

Where, oh where could it be? The Gay Mother has been of the view that it will turn up. But it hasn’t.

So wonder of wonders that they were still in stock at Angus Willis’s and I could get another, all for £7.50.

Shopping has its moments of such intense rightness such as St Theresa of Avila or St Paul on the Road to Damascus must have felt when the Lord was revealed.

So that was that. On Wednesday last I arrived at the Gay Mother’s. It wasn’t until yesterday that I managed to get into the garden. I hadn’t intended to weed under the kitchen window but her view from the house is a priority. Well, would you believe it? Beneath a seething mass of Mexican daisy, there it was – the missing butter knife… somehow it had fallen out of the kitchen window into the flower bed. The maid must have been in a hurry or a fury. Or did a fox get in?

So, where just over a week ago there was one butter knife, now there are three.

Monday 18th November 2025

Bulgaria was at the end of September. There’s a new thing now where people in the same travelling party don’t sit together on the flight. Anthony Mottram, formerly ‘consultant’ of Prague who has sold up for €€€€€€€€€€€, even threatened to buy speedy security queue on the spot – just for himself.

Where was the private jet? That was my question.

In Sofia, we dined in an artist’s flat that had no furniture and went on the mountains the next day. The orphans aren’t there any more or at least only a handful. Supposedly they have been fostered or accommodated elsewhere in more appropriate ‘settings’. Robert Nevil rather longed for the old days of the summer drama festival when charming children roamed the village, failing remarkably to get run over by the enormous lorries that trundled through.

The village has gone up. There’s a spa villa for rent and we were in it. No matter that it was only about 3′ wide, clinging to the side of the mountain. The mind of the coffee machine was impossible to penetrate.

Glorious scenery and marvellous weather. We walked in a gorge. We lunched at the ski resort in a high mountain field. Very ‘Sound of Music’. We walked some distance from the hotel in which one of the orphans who’s done well has a rental interest. He was dressed cap a ped in Prada mint green. There was a label ‘Prada’ on the ‘top’. As we went along the road the lunch party mysteriously swelled. Anthony Mottram wasn’t pleased, although not paying. Too many lunching and some of them smoking and not really lunching in any purposeful way. Anthony Mottram went to strike and refused to speak.

The main event was the showing of the documentary film about the great glory days of the summer drama festival, which lasted for almost 15 years until 2016, paid for by Anthony Mottram and delivered by artistes marshalled by Sonia Lipov who had made the film. Really the festival was the most remarkable thing, joyful and colourful and not a bit regimented, as school drama so often is. The orphans had never imagined that they’d be dancing or wearing masks or that anybody would take any trouble to show them how to and they’d have glorious costumes as well. So for them it was all a miracle and a revelation and, when the final performance was given, this was what came across.

The day before the showing of the film (amazingly the village has quite a grand theatre, although now shabby) we went to the ghetto to encourage some of the Roma who were in the film to come to the screening. The ghetto was a bit frightening – a shanty-town arrangement of shacks and wrecked cars although the actual living quarters were brick-built but apparently unfinished, just an inner skin of bricks with cement oozing out. Perhaps another layer was supposed to go on top but nobody had bothered.

The Roma surged around the car, possibly about to declare war. Luckily Sonia Lipov was able to speak to them. The particular ones we were looking for were working in a nearby filling station, so off we went to find them. Delirious scenes of reunion. Some English spoken. More and more Roma appeared, one who had been idling by on a bicycle even, although he was not of sufficient significance to be spoken to or to speak. The Russian owner of the filling station was looking on, mystified as to why three English people should be paying a call on her Roma at work. One of the Roma felt obliged at one point to leap up a scaffolding and make a show of washing the underside of the roof of the filling station. Terrible teeth were a feature. The one who could speak English (up to a point) got a terrible ribbing from the others. His name was Jesus. The husband of the young woman who was expecting a third or fourth child looked sweet but hopeless. The young woman had been a big star of the festivals and still had a lot of go, evidently. They were sure they would come to the next day to the screening.

What a visit. Never to be forgotten.

At the screening was another Jesus, of staggering beauty. ‘This is my girlfriend’ he said in the challenging way of those new to romance. The girlfriend was a comforting figure. They didn’t stay for the dinner after. The screening was attended but only three orphans, the gorgeous Jesus, the one with the hotel interest and another from Plovdiv who was a basketball champion. The Roma never came.

The restaurant laid on a huge spread. The basket ball champion had brought a mate. It was a bromance. The mate spoke of his cat, of the vast knowledge of his cat, of the cat being everywhere and knowing everything. It was a terrific riff for one with hardly any English and I, Adrian Edge, had induced it by Royal style paying of attention to guests who are holding back. Only later did it emerge that the cat had been dead for years.

Robert Nevil was saddened by the visit, although glad to have gone. I wonder if we will go again into the Bulgarian mountains and visit the ghetto.

27th October 2025

My kitchen floor gives more trouble than any other feature of my home. But you wouldn’t think it to look at it. It is distressed, the paint finish worn bare in places. What the public don’t know is that it is highly managed.

There’s distressed and there’s distressed. This distressed has got to be just right. Parts must be re-touched frequently, as bits chip off with wear. I loom with an artist’s brush and a small sample jar of the colour wash, self-mixed. It’s important to understand that I mixed the colour myself 30 years ago. It had chrome green in it and various ocres, as well as black and indigo – or so I thought. I have an unexplained knack for colour. When I aim to match, I match.

After I’d tortoise-shelled that trolley – well, its old wheels chewed up the kitchen floor. A whole section had to be re-done. The builder screwed a fortune out of me just to sand it.

Then I set too to re-colour. Except the colour. It just would not come right. My gift for colour – how could it have deserted me at the vital moment? I tried 14 times. Every time it was wrong. I wrecked seven T-shirts which got splattered. Specs of green wash got on the cupboards, which are Imperial Chinese Yellow. They’ll have to be re-done.

At the 14th attempt, I thought: it’ll just have to be part of the history of the house. Like the great scorch marks on the floors at Uppark, where burning beams fell in the conflagration there in the 1980s.

But then Joshua Baring came round. For the Garden Opening actually. ‘This,’ he said, pointing to the original section of floor, ‘is a subtle colour. And this…’ pointing the new bit, ‘is not.’

The only hope is: Joshua Baring knows a genius colour specialist. But with taxes, inflation, costs and threats – can I run to £10,000 for a section of floor 8 foot x 3?

Thursday 23rd October 2025

Arrival at Frieze Art Fayre took place, followed, after an interval, by departure therefrom.

‘Black,’ Royston King said, ‘everybody’s in black.’ ‘Maybe you should pursue a new career in fashion notes,’ I said.

Royston was right: black was crucial for frockage.

Except that ‘everybody’ meant ‘hardly anyone’ because so few were there in the first place to take up the option of wearing black. Whither the contemporary art market? Whither the art world?

Has it whirled elsewhere by private jet?

Are strangely constructed invoices now flying between other cities? Shadowy loans. The odd art dealer actually in prison. But still the missing millions.

Although hitmen, unexpected volleys of machine gun fire have not as yet featured, who knows what lurks beneath the acres of blond mink carpet at Frieze Art Fayre.

Joshua Baring said he saw Sadiq Khan, George Osborne (a relation of me, Adrian Edge), Lennie di Cap etc.

We saw nobody. Only the Marquis of Cholmondeley. But he wasn’t wearing his State Robes.

As for the Fare on sale – it’s said that painting is back. ‘Conceptual’ is finished. But the essentials of painting, such as form and colour, have yet to be mastered. Flimsy gimmicks continue to sell for hundreds of thousands as usual.

No doubt, with careful burrowing, better goods could have been found.

We were accosted by a young man in a black jumper with a necklace, slacks and superb slip-ons. He said he’d heard Royston booming for only 2 seconds and recognised him at once from TV. What was astonishing was that such a person should be watching Royalty TV on a Saturday night. He asked Royston where he is from which seems to be all right if you’re both diverse. This young man didn’t speak standard English, shall we say. From a snobbish point of view, he was not the obvious type to represent artists. But that’s what he said he was doing. And why not?

So maybe there is hope for the London Art World after all.

Wednesday 22nd October 2025

More and more I am like Royalty: back-to-back functions, three minutes to change in between.

Cartier was last Wednesday morning. To actually gaze on the Williamson Pink Diamond brooch, which she wore at the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana in 1981. And Wallis’s collection. She bagged the most distinctive: a whole jewelled tiger to be pinned on or a flamingo.

Jewels rocket in interest according to whom they have belonged. The Portland tiara, made for the Duchess of Portland to wear at the Coronation of Edward V11 was nowhere to be seen – because it was stolen in 2018 and apparently destroyed. It was seen by me, Adrian Edge, at the Tiaras Exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum many years ago, when Debo wrote the piece in the Graph about it which started, ‘What are tiaras for?’ – the best opening of any newspaper article ever.

The Cartier pieces are remarkable for their fineness. Who knew that sheets of rock crystal could be used to give a gauze-like backing to the setting? One tiara was so delicate it could have been airborne.

But big rocks are unavoidable. The Maharajah has a very fine emerald on his finger always. But here the emeralds looked like boiled sweets or lumps of plastic even. Another discovery was the vanity case: a tiny jewelled box for no apparent purpose, perhaps, as declared, a vanity case. Cartier did them in different styles, including Japanese.

The exhib was thrilling but shattering. The film of another Maharajah wearing some of the jewels on display at a coronation of himself he thought it vital to stage in 1940 during World War shows that massive quantities of diamonds suit a man very well.

If this was the point of having the Coronation it was thoroughly worthwhile.

After luncheon at the Museum I was propelled with ferocity to Frieze Art Fayre, Regent’s Park for the Private View at 3pm.

If Royston were ever not to get this card, I think I’d die. Death would really be the only choice. What other excuse could be contrived for not being there? Since not being there would be Death anyway, you can see there’s no escape.

Come back later for more… come back later to find out what happened at Frieze Art Fayre Wednesday Private View

Monday 20th October 2025

Joshua Baring gave a seated tea at his residence. The occasion was his birthday although it wasn’t until the next day. The styling was a Jack-the-Ripper type alley, with rubbish bags heaped by the front door, even burst open. Within a lacquered biblioteque interior, a luxurious cabinet. The Sevres was laid out, and rare modern Japanese tea cups, a sumptious jewelled scene lifted yet higher by a Ducal presence, a direct link to the Vanderbilts and impish Robert Nevil as one licensed at Court to say the unsayable, except that he would have been most put out that Joshua adores The Gilded Age, as do I, Adrian Edge.

Before a Versailles tapestry, we thrilled to the new concept of the Sugar Kitchen. Who would have thought that after years of Kitchens, there would suddenly be a Sugar Kitchen. Lady Baring’s birthday gift, a Hester Bateman teapot, was already in use. At Frieze Art Fayre, Joshua seemed to believe he had spent £3 million for his own ends but his precise funding is shrouded in mystery. He could have everything or nothing.

He said that dessicated coconut goes hard with heat, which is why my Kerulan Aubergine with Coconut Sauce often has that finger-nail feel. I’ve tried to get it right so many times that the Maharajah, who’s gone back to India for a spell, hid my book of Kerulan cooking.

Joshua Baring – his knit was of infinite fascination. The finest, finest lambswool and such a shade of fawn. I assumed one of the best houses and easily £3000.

But it was Uniqlo.

Saturday 4th October 2025

As you know there is no official summer holiday these days with the exception of this year. Anthony Mottram (who sold his ‘consultancy’ for ££££££££ ) and Prince Dmitri took a villa in Cefalonia. I, Adrian Edge, managed to get there by Ryan Air.

Exiting the machine at Cefalonia, I encountered those Gays that go to fun clubs for instant fun. They were trolling the other way to board for London. They’d been visiting Ed Jasper, the bedlinen expert, and Roland Mainflower, who’ve got a branch in the north of the island. Terraces, maids, antique flower pots and a pool.

News of my arrival was flashed instantly. But it was too far to go since I had no vehicle.

Cefalonia was earthquaked in 1954 (or thereabouts). Very little of it was left. The villages are pink and new. The scenery is glorious.

The villa was classic gay in one way – entirely on its own. Half way up a mountain in wild terrain. Tremendous views. Within less gay. Oh dear, the floor tiles. One longed to re-do. And a toilet in the drawing room.

The main thing was the cats. Anthony Mottram would make cat noises every morning. Without fail the cats would appear. The black and white cat was bolder. The poor stripey one hardly got any of the food. When I tried to make cat noises, the more forward cat replied in the most off-hand manner. It could hardly to bothered.

But I thought my cat noises were quite good.

Otherwise sheep went by every evening at six pm. They had bells round their necks, so it was a musical event. There was no shepherd. They removed themselves elsewhere of their own accord.

There was a theme among the younger people of going to the neighbouring island, which is called Zakynthos. I suppose it’s inevitable that if you’re on one island, you long to get to another one within view … but out of reach, as it happened.

Now, as the autumn leaves are hounded by wind in the grey streets of London, how magical it was that we were there. Every evening we descended to the beach. The villa pool we never entered. The emptying beach as the shadows lengthened, a few elderly British people marooned on the sand, catching the final rays, the hope of paradise fading but not gone …

Tuesday 23rd September 2025

To the Garden Museum Literary Festival, this year at Iford Manor.

There was a theme of ladies-in-waiting.

This broadcast is also How England Really is.

I, Adrian Edge, missed last year’s at Sezincote. The year before, at Parham, Amanda and Stoker didn’t come. But the Riblats did.

For only £150, you are elevated to the Riblats or Amanda and Stoker.

This year, we saw Stoker in the middle of the field, near the lunch tent. Royston King was on him at once. Not ‘Your Grace! Your Grace!’ as at Houghton, in 2019. But ‘Stoker, Stoker.’ ‘Hello, I’m Stoker.’ ‘Has Amanda come?’ ‘Did you bring your driver?’ ‘No, I came by taxi.’ At lunch, Stoker was sitting alone. It was self-collect from a buffet, seating at long tables. He had a notebook and an iPhone. Our direction was clear. What an opportunity. Almost unbelievable. The 12th Duke of Devonshire. Quite alone. The field completely clear. Nothing to stop us. But on the way we came upon our favourite Museum Director lunching. ‘I think Stoker’s happy on his own,’ he said.

So we went no further.

All the same – the elevation.

The pre-lunch talk was Thomas Pakenham, in fact Long Longford, on trees. He’s 92. Many interesting facts not known to me, Adrian Edge, previously – such as that Magnolia Campbelli was in fact discovered by Hooker who named it after Archibald Campbell, the administrator of his plant-hunting expedition. The compare of the talk was called Campbell-Preston. Afterwards I asked her if by any chance she was in Waiting to Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. ‘That was my mother-in-law,’ she said.

By the lunch buffet I ran into Tom Stuart Smith. ‘Hello, I’m Adrian Edge.’ ‘Yes, I know you,’ he goes. Blinding. Tom Stuart Smith knows me, Adrian Edge.

Anyway, the thing is, his grandmother was Lizzie Motion, who was in Waiting to Her Late Majesty Queen Mary.

So that made a theme of Ladies-in-Waiting.

There was a tour of the Garden then a talk with Tom Stuart Smith (which was heaven). So many confessions! Such as how he couldn’t resist the yellow azaleas at Crocus for his Chelsea Garden which cost him Best in Show because the self-appointed ‘brief’ was ‘drought-resistant’ therefore azaleas impossible.

Stoker was in the front row for the talk, busy writing in his notebook.

There was a tour of the garden. Then I had to leave by car for the Gay Mother’s.

I’d always thought Iford was in the middle of Bradford-on-Avon. It isn’t. Its glory is the setting … in a vale, no other houses except the manor, a fine Palladian facade but a gentleman’s house, not a mansion, beside a lane and a river, unchanged for centuries. Somehow extraordinary that such a facade would occur in the middle of nowhere like that. Sir Harold Peto, I think, put a grand Italian statue on the bridge before the house.

The garden is architectural, by Sir Harold Peto. Edwardian. Quite nice. Except the Japanese garden, horrid and damp. It’s got an Appian Way, an Etruscan colonnade and a Florentine cloister, all cleverly inserted into a smallish space. But no flowers to speak of. Nor shrubs of great interest. But that will change.

Sunday 21st September 2025

On the way I, Adrian Edge, ran into Harry Rollo and Mercury Mr Kitten at the traffic lights. They were returning from a private outing to the Jarman House on the sand dunes.

Only some of the most well-known people in their fields – at the traffic lights.

I couldn’t stop long because due at the Hall. Our seats were in a box. I assumed the allocation was random but maybe not.

The boxes at the Hall are for twelve not known to each other. Royston King and I, Adrian Edge, took our seats. It was to be the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra – very, very high.

Little did we know what glory was to ensue. There were other people in the box but unknowns. To the side though, there was a stirring, a sense of presence which rapidly materialised. Royston at once was wondering whether to hail… the Controller of Radio 3, whose drinks party we had attended at the previous Prom. He was right next to us. Royston didn’t wonder for long. The megaphone was out.

Others were taking their seats. Among them Matthew Bonne Femme, the gardener, superb in florals as was his husband. But too far away to get the attention of..

We had to wait until the interval, where outside in the corridor there was a flurry. Matthew Bonne Femme remembered me. I had to shout Royston King down to get across to him about the Crape Myrtle. Royston had started up about the Memorial Garden for Queen Elizabeth 11 in Regent’s Park. The Controller of Radio 3 was trotting on the spot. The corridor behind the boxes – it could be a hotel but exclusive. Only box-holders present. The murmur was – the Chairman of the BBC was somewhere, in one of the boxes. But which one?

We conducted a sweep. Royston longed to crash but veered. Many box doors open, but no Chair of the BBC.

It was only on the way back that through an open door we saw the Controller of Radio 3 making a speech to a small ring of persons who applauded. Then somebody said, ‘Ah, Royston!’

And we were in. The occupants of the Chair’s box had never known such a whirl, such a thrill of the not planned-for. The former Director General was there. Others we’d met at Petworth. Trustees, Committee members. Drinks, crisps. You’d have thought we were radical drag artists or extreme LGBTQ+ extremists such was the excitement, the diversion from their set agendas. The Chair was bouncing up and down as Royston gave feedback on his Select Committee appearance that day. ‘I’m a good foil to the Director-General,’ he repeated, ‘I’m a good foil…at last I’m a foil…’

He couldn’t have loved it more.

We returned to our box for the Tchaikovsky – this was just about the most prestigious of the Proms. The whirly bits of the Tchai – you just couldn’t believe it. Was it ever so played in live performance? How could they do it?

On the way out we saw Lady Susan Hussey half-way through a swing door. The BBC, it seemed, had taken at least three boxes, a carpet of boxes with guests.

What an occasion. What a miracle.

3rd September 2025

The Chateau fragment is booming: soon it will be six-bedroom, five toilet, and with an arse-kitchen. The side shed has been knocked down and the premises is surging on the left flank. Lamprey de Hautbois , the best-born builder ever, is personally tiling the new roof. He is now a Kardashian of the Landed Gentry after starring in a heart-wrenching misery TV documentary on streaming TV about the breaking-up of his family home, bought in the 60s from the sale of a Jan Eyck.

Matt Driver had interrupted his Norman sojourn to visit his mother in England, so joined my car at Newhaven for the return trip. Near Rouen, he said I lacked an official sticker re: emissions of the car. I’d never heard of such a thing and am not impressed with the recent history of most European countries as police states. But Matt Driver was hours peering at his phone trying to determine the extent of the exclusion zone around Rouen. We had to go round a long way.

Matt Driver once shaped the taste of Nations, if not the world. Now, although on the pay-roll, he sits all day with nothing to do, like those sisters in Gormenghast who were forgotten in some far-flung corner of the castle. Years later, rotted purple fragments of their frocks were found, the only evidence of their existence.

But Matt Driver is on that neighbourhood committee; the friends of the Common outside his London windows. Laura Malcolm was saying it was too much for him. He shouldn’t be laying awake at night. But no, he’s ousted the malcontents and formed a new committee.

Laura Malcolm did a Welcome Dinner, including self-sugared lavender sprigs. Her menu-ing detail is amazing. There are always three or four salsas and at least two garnishes. I said she ought to have a Home-making Show, like Megane. Matt Driver said it would be quite something with the flies buzzing round, the battered batterie de cuisine, the debris accumulating on the floor and Laura’s special way of man-handling the food – she uses her hands to smear salsa verde like it was still the Middle Ages and possibly even mayonnaise too.

The Norman Poor Little Rich Gays are otherwise going strong if perhaps ploughing fewer furrows than before. The Lairdess is doing less lurid innuendo sugar-coated with cut-glass vowels. Instead every 48 hours, her mouth opens and out comes the name of that Welsh town that’s the longest name of any town ever.

Moira McMatron described how in childhood, owing to Catholicism, she imagined her soul as a long piece gradually getting blacker and blacker, the black spots merging into one another. But at Confession she had to rack her brains to think of anything to confess.

This year, her frockage acquired new heights. Like Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother she was never seen before noon when she would appear completely finished. I really thought it was Royalty. She’s using monobloc colour like Royalty, each day a different colour, and hung about with jewellery to such an extend you can’t tell where it’s coming from – just a blaze of gold and diamonds.

We had the Laird’s quiz as always, a work of genius. But Laura Malcolm protested that too many marks were allotted to the false answers round, allowing the men’s team to draw a little nearer to the women’s. The Laird had a breakdown and was on the point of packing up all his projectors, sound machines and scoring systems. He’s an unusual man. Normally he sticks strictly to facts. But if certain songs are played he begins randomly to weep. Nobody really knows why but he’s famous for it.

The Laird’s major theme this year was the superiority of wire corkscrews over foil. I never even knew there was either foil or wire, let alone which is best. There seem to have been fewer developments on the weed-killer front, which is another of the Laird’s interests. The odd thing is he doesn’t touch a drop, doesn’t drink at all and isn’t a gardener. A new line for him though was as cow-whisperer. He was out in the field, divining which was the matriarch as a prelude to bonding more fully with the herd.

One day the water had to be switched off because, after showering I found the shower wouldn’t shut off. I was blamed, of course. There’s a brutal side to the Norman experience. The plumber couldn’t come at once because it was Ferragosto. A nightmare regime ensued where Laura Malcolm would switch on the water supply for strictly 15 minute slots only. All toiletting and toilette work had be carried out in that time and at no other. The beginning and end of the water period was marked by the tremendous barked command of Laura Malcolm, such as might be heard on the parade ground at the Knightsbridge barracks.

After 36 hours of this the plumber came. In the meantime Matt Driver touched up a little chip in the varnish on the lav seat which I pointed out to him. But there’s no doubt, behind every man who amounts to anything, there lies a formidable woman.