Thursday 23rd March 2023

The back door got left open all night. It was me, Adrian Edge, that had opened it. The Gay Mother said, ‘Well, it wasn’t cold and there were no burglars,’ as if burglars were no more than a natural phenomenon like squirrels or pigeons that might get in.

Coming back from the garden centre, I raised the question of the Easter menus. ‘I don’t like lamb,’ the Gay Mother said as if this has always been the case. But only a year ago she was adoring a lamb shank as a new experience. She would like to revive Piperade though. That’s the Spanish dish of red pepper and tomato cooked to a pulp then eggs scrambled into it.

After lunch one day I happened to take a magnolia walk. A Magnolia Campbellii had flowered. The owner was thrilled because it was blooming early – 25 years after planting, not 30 as expected.

On my return, the Gay Mother said few who plant a Campbellii live to see it flower. Not only this:  it can’t be planted by just anybody but only those ‘who know what they’re doing.’

The Gay Mother has never planted a Magnolia Campbellii, not having the right soil. But had she done she would surely have lived to see it flower.

Wednesday 15th March 2023

So many brilliant moments, all lost.

At the Garden Museum, Aunt Lavinia said, ‘That’s never a buddleia.’ It was a beautifully wrought exhib of Lucian Freud plant paintings, labels crisp and informative, no jargon or ideology. Many rare pieces. They mocked up Debo’s guest bathroom at Chatsworth with his cyclamen muriel. At his best, Freud paints plants with bracing ruthless neutrality, an intense pure gaze, ‘to an airy thinness beat’. But the buddleia in the dismal Paddington back garden is smudgy and the heavy pencil drawings I don’t like.

The Garden Museum Cafe was closed for a fund-raising event. I could see the place-names through the window. I could also see our favourite Museum Director through the window. So, w

ho is ‘Thursday Sembler’? Or ‘Noah Beatrice’? Or ‘Hilda Thurlough’? No sign of the usuals – no Stoker and Amanda, nor Ladies E and R?

I made a plant discovery though: Heavenly Bamboo, growing in the courtyard there where Captain Bligh is buried and the Tradescants. It’s not a bamboo at all. A dark evergreen with showy clusters of bright red berries. Good enough for the Garden Museum…

So lunch in exile at the Cinnamon Club. Fixed price menu good but not hot. Not hot is a new feature of restaurants since the Time of Wrong. Possibly anti-climate change measures.

In residence I had the madeira dinner. Stefan Jaeger proposed it months ago. He’d got a bottle of madeira from 1827, the year of Beethoven’s death. Harry Rollo and Mercury Mr Kitten were to dine, me, Adrian Edge, to menu around the madeira. As the day drew near, increasing dread. How ever to live up to a Madeira from 1827? What if the bottle broke in transit? Or, on being opened, was found to be empty?

One was on a knife-edge with ruin. First of all, Mr K went to the North and got a sore throat so couldn’t come. He said he would never go there again. But I expect he will. Well, the bottle arrived in a back-pack. I’d been granted a vision of the menu which I was able to make earthly but only at the last could I find a butcher offering filet beef at an imaginable price. So: little squares of pain polane au raisons mounted with paté, taralli with the first of the madeira in the drawing room, then filet beef with rosti potatoes (to give a German feel, although rosti are Swiss) juniper and port jus, purple sprouting broccoli. Poached rhubarb and ginger with self-made madeira cake, plus some rare Italian cheese called Stracchino to polish off the madeira. I got the cheese free because it was beyond the ‘best before’ date – a miracle and going some way to making up for the cost of the filet beef. As Maria says in the Music’s Sound, ‘When God closes a door, he opens a window somewhere else.’

In the end we were knocking back that madeira at £3000 a glass (Stefan Jaeger got it from a rich lady whose cellar was flooded so all the labels washed awff, slashing the value). How did we dare approach? Really a reverent sniff followed by a backwards withdrawal without looking back as if from the Cenotaph should have been the limit. I’m preserving the bottle and inhale from it regularly. A transfigured grape arises, incredibly material although a smell. But a living liquid alive when Beethoven was alive, unlikely to be encountered again and impossible of description. How would you describe Madame Makropulis, were you to meet her? There were three layers at least of quite different experience when the madeira was consumed, not sweet, not dry, not heavy, not light, with a strange fumy ‘finish’.

But what of the brilliant talk? Harry Rollo and Stefan Jaeger – so many remarks. All lost. Evap.

The Actual Bottle: Madeira from 1827

Aunt Lavinia: ‘That’s never a Buddleia’

Lucian Freud: Messy

Lucian Freud: Medieval Quality of Tranquility

Lucian Freud: An Olive Leaf. Incredibly Rare Early Work. Superb

Lucian Freud: Chatsworth Bathroom Cyclamen: Stunning

Monday 6th March 2023

Cousin Smurry said we should drive onto the Moor and take 99s from the ice-cream van by the bridge. As it happened the Gay Mother wasn’t thrilled with the lunch at the riverside inn but appreciated the champagne. She took 99 years. Not best pleased. ‘Another year’s gone by,’ she said mysteriously. Otherwise it’s business as usual. The present campaign is to fight, fight for the Right to Roam in the woods to be granted to another elderly lady in the valley. This involves her in a battle with her own land agent, who happens also to have the owner of the wood as a client – awkward. And behind them the hedge-fund manager who owns the shoot. The Gay Mother against the lot of them. She’d walk in the woods if she weren’t 99 and once clubbed a pheasant to death with that cudgel the Gay Father put by the bed every time a convict was out from the prison. Although she did say she wouldn’t do it again.

Nor does she think that Begum should be kept out. In a refugee camp, she’s likely to grow more dangerous. Other countries seek to rehabilitate people like her. The further topic is the Prime Minister of India, who is called Nodi, I believe. He’s evil.

Wednesday 1st March 2023

At Donatello Royston King corrected my dress manually. He didn’t want me buttoned to the neck. The coat was awful anyway. My grey Zara – on the previous Friday at the Abbey I’d crashed with outfit dissatisfaction. If only I’d been in that coat and not the the Oliver Spencer which contrasted too harshly with my white summer-into-winter slacks.

Nothing more terrible than realising an outfit error when too far from home to turn back. Which was why I was trying to make a comeback in the Zara coat at the V&A on the Monday.

There was a surprise third person for Donatello – one of the War Correspondents. It can’t have been the one with the eye patch because she’d dead. In any case, this one didn’t have an eye patch. Nor the one who’s a friend of Genevieve Suzy. Tilda Finkelsgarten was revealed. She was the hero of the White House Coup 1993, as she found occasion to explain.  What a scoop that was. All the other correspondents had gone on holiday. She led her team through the tank barricade. Someone was left behind to inform their embassies if they didn’t return. In the event, the tank drivers refrained from gunning her down. Instead they asked for cigarettes: enthusiasm for the coup clearly reduced to a minimum but a scoop for her.

Tilda and Royston stood in the middle of the exhibition planning the future of the museum and criticising the audience as mostly on sticks and white. That had not been the idea when Royston gave the money for the extension where the exhib was lodged. It was quite expensive, maybe £50 million.

Why did the V&A need an extension anyway? Isn’t it big enough already?

I didn’t like the space – gloomy, ugly roof and all the exhibits crammed against the walls or poked into corners, with the infirm crowding round. I adore Donatello. Always have done. The bronze David doing the catwalk completely bare but for a hat…That couldn’t come, of course. The Bargello would never have let it out. But the St John the Evan has come. I’ve always wondered about that metal halo stuck on to his head – could anything be less halo-like?

I don’t know how Donatello is explained. He was so early. I’d not realised. Born 1386. Seems to have arrived as a fully-formed Renaissance artist although perhaps the small scale and charm of his work is a legacy of the Middle Ages, but it’s a charm that is somehow shocking for the period. The astonishing bass-relief of the Madonna and Child I’d never seen before. What a revelation – so intense the gaze between them. Even the Gay Mother had heard about it 250 miles away. These things make an impact.

It’s a demanding exhib. Lots of small things to look at. Emphasis on craft, how innovative Donatello was and how he experimented with many different techniques.

At lunch suddenly we were cruising. Royston had commented earlier on the only person below 50 present at the show. Spray-on black jeans, skin-fade with top quiff. Now we were lunching with him. Except he didn’t take anything because of cost. I said, ‘Duchy salmon is £10 a pack. What is to be…’ ‘Be quiet,’ Royston said. Too banal. He was discussing Royal affairs with this person, who is interviewing for the Collection this week. Unbelievably he’d read The Quest for Queen Mary by Pope-Hennessey –  so must get the job. I managed to tell a story from the Lees-Milne diaries: the one when the Queen said at Badminton that she was opening Sandringham to the public. ‘Mummy’s furious with me for doing it.’ Lees-Milne said he rather agreed with Mummy.

The cruising spirit was raging. There was a random man on my other side who appeared to want action there and then. He insisted on linking via Insta. Quite honestly it could have been a strangler. He was that forward. Apparently his parents had gone to Isleworth for the day. The sooner they came back and got their offspring under control the better.  Where was the War Correspondent when you needed her? She was lunching but had had to dash off because of those Chinese balloons.

Eventually it was just Royston and myself. I was marched to various galleries where I seemed to have been before – the Winchester stained glass, a jewel of Queen Victoria’s, the Devonshire tapestry, some fabulous old embroidered cope. All English things, or British. It was an antidote, you see. Not European, like Donatello, assumed to be superior.Not: only European culture good, like French food, better than British. No, the greatness of Our Nation. We led the way in embroidery. Our objects in general hardly barbarian.

‘Just rejoice’ as Margaret would have said.

Donatello – Champion of Rilievo Schiacciato or ‘Squashed Relief’; this Piece is in the V&A anyway. Miracle

Donatello: Madonna and Child. From Berlin, I think. The Intensity has Shattered the World 

St John the Bap: Treasure from the Bargello brought to London

V&A African Fashion Exhib. Some Very good Designers who are African making Lovely Clothes

African People in Fashion

Handbag from Africa

Sunday 19th February 2023

Last week to Kew for the Orchid Reception in the Princess of Wales Conservatory: strange arrangement of guests threaded on paths through exotic greenery, luxury winter flowering exotics and arcs of orchids imported specially as a winter attraction. The Head of Kew addressed the throng from high up in the rain forest apparently. Later he spoke privately to me, Adrian Edge, about the cost of heating the Princess of Wales conservatory. Devastating. The Palm House is next – £25 million or some such required for restoration. The designer of the orchids was more plant than human; even his hair was green. Otherwise we had: the Head of Wisley, the Head of the Physic Garden, the BBC Science correspondent who spoke well of the King having interviewed him re: climate change. We had RHS luminaries. A Princess dropped her phone down a grille and a team came to heave up the grille with special equipment and retrieve it. It turned out she’d given £20,000. So had her friend. Finally we had the Leader of Richmond Council. Leaving we wanted toilet and tried to piss Kew but a guard barked, ‘Stay on the path.’ So we had to piss Kew Green instead.

On Friday Royston toured me at Westminster Abbey. The idea was to get close to the forthcoming Coronation. The Abbey is so small, although the tallest nave in England. On TV it looks huge but it isn’t. Then there’s all the clutter of monuments and tombs, an extraordinary clamour of persons demanding to be remembered, crammed in any old how, many of them due for cancellation unfortunately. Expect to see Archbishop Welby with hammer and chisel bashing tablets off the wall any day soon. Lucky he was previously an oil exec so has a practical side.

What’s incredible are the tombs of the medieval monarchs – such as Richard 1, Edward 111 and Henry V. I always thought these people were in plays by Shakespeare or as poems by Eleanor Farjeon. But if they’ve got tombs they must have existed. Quite a thought. I don’t think Welby will be able to get rid of any of them.

The Abbey was comforting. Somehow there will always be a monarchy with all those slabs. Queen Elizabeth 1’s tomb quite immovable.

What about the Henry V11 Chapel? Could hardly believe it. All these years this raging extravagance of devotion and Tudor aggrandisement has been there. But hardly ever have I visited.

Perhaps that’s a measure of its rarity. To go all the time would be wrong somehow.

We went up into the new galleries in the roof. Wren put a floor in there. In 2012 a new staircase and housing were added to allow public access. This building has lived and lived. Magical display of the Abbey plate and the original altar front as well as replica Crown Jewels used for Coronation Rehearsals.

I tried to tell Royston that my grandparents were saved by their choice of the Abbey over the Guards Chapel for service the Sunday morning the bomb fell on the latter killing nearly everybody there. Had they veered differently who knows how our destiny would have fallen. Also in the 1940s,  the Gay Mother saw in the Abbey at morning service Her Late Majesty Queen Mary and the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, with his daughter. Royston was unimpressed. He has sat with all the Royal Family in the Abbey as a special guest for the Commonwealth Day Service. Random encounters at normal Matins are as nothing.

I mentioned that maybe the Koh-i-noor should be returned to India. Certainly not, Royston boomed. In the garden of the abbey were some of the best crocuses I have ever seen, not flattened by rain this year as they almost always are.

The Coronation Chair, Partly Dismantled for Restoration Owing to the Forthcoming Coronation. I Thought the Stand underneath New but it isn’t. Royston wants Queen Mary 11’s Coronation Chair used for Queen Camilla but his Suggestion has not so far been taken Up. Not quite Sure how you Sit in this Chair – those Animals would be in the Way? 

Incredible Views from the Abbey Garden. Who Knew this was Possible in the Middle of London?

Another Rare View

The Best Crocuses Ever – Westminster Abbey

Tuesday 14th February 2023

The Gay Mother said that beetroot is a winter vegetable… funny, because I’d always thought it was summer… those little ones the size of golf-balls straight in from the garden.

But no. Beetroot are a winter vegetable. Which maybe is why they have been particularly good recently from Waitrose.

Wednesday 8th February 2023

Val announced that for the visit of myself and Anthony Mottram to his Moscova, Hastings, we would be having a tasting menu, i.e. a menu that tastes of something – such a novelty.

The Gay Mother has declared a kale named ‘Pentland Brig’ to be good. She has continued with swede work, although her latest swede did not live up to the first. Finishing a casserole of beef, she was to be seen with a pot of possible damson chutney. So it was a mystery that what ended up on the plate tasted of orange. ‘I put marmalade as well,’ the Gay Mother said, and practically doubled up with glee at the wickedness of it.

We actually lunched out – at Marks and Spencer. Except it was rammed even at 12 noon by old people and there was no lunch. Only toasted sandwiches. No salads, no made-dishes, not even a moussaka. However morale was boosted and the Gay Mother sketched plans to have lunch in a restaurant in a valley where 50 years ago she had much disliked the chef, who had previously been a violinist. Her husband was a pomposity with a waistcoat and watch-chain who toured the tables garnering praise. The Gay Mother also wants to visit an Art Gallery where there is a cafe. We could have gone there instead of Marks and Spencer, if only we’d thought of it.

I forgot to mention the agony of the patties. They cost £9.00 for three so I was hardly going to throw them away. £7.20 was the price to park outside the Farm Shop for 5 minutes (such are the Communist authorities in North London). So I parked on a non-paying basis. Panting in the shop, I managed to get out with the patties and few other things (£26.92) before anybody in authority appeared. But back at my vehicle, flapped and rushing, somehow the car door opening caught the bag of patties and dashed them to the ground. There was nothing for it but to pick them off the floor and hope for the best. Later I dusted off the little black specks. Surely a thorough heating up in the Aga would kill off typhoid or whatever?

Well, it’s ten days since eating the patties. No ill effects so far.

The Gay Mother’s Swede Work

The Agony of the Patties

Sunday 5th February 2023

The public side of January was Art. Lucien Freud was at the National Gallery. The early work – its extraordinary texture, like fine cloth, intensely present yet, like porcelain, breakable. He went on in this way. Even with broader brushstrokes, incredibly delicate and purposeful. Awful to say, Winslow Homer in the same National Gallery was a liberation after Lucien. Variety. Quite a few duds, but the good ones thrilling – the man scything the corn, Who could forget that? Dressing for the Carnival, sumptuous yet tragedy lurking somehow. Winslow saw glamour at awful moments as in the painting of the Confederate surrender. The star is the hot captured soldier, slouching provocatively. The label said ‘Defiance: provoking a shot before Petersburg’ was Winslow’s only Civil War painting but there were two Civil War paintings in the show and of course many more not there. A muscular black man on a boat was said by the label to be ‘fetish-ised’. But Winslow liked big strapping blond men too, as was all too apparent.

The London Art Fair had no Winslows for sale. Some Lucien Freud etchings were so heavy and dark. There are three of them, the titans of modern British art, Lucien, Francis Bacon and another called Auberbach. Francis Bacon was massive at the Royal Academy last year. It’s not so much that he was plainly quite weird in himself. The chiaroscuro rendering of the contorted blocks of body parts just isn’t very interesting as painting. It’s what anybody would do given some oil paint and a canvas – try to do shading and scrape it. Otherwise you’ve got those vast plains of rather horrid colour, often nylon pink. It must have been very difficult to get it on so smoothly, I will give him that.

The London Art Fair showed how much has to be sifted out. Two Winifred Nicholsons were gorgeous. Hockney was only minimally present, an etching glimpsed perhaps but enough. He is the greatest. It’s becoming clearer and clearer with every day that passes.

Not showing So Well in a Photo but the Rendering of the Cloth Here – A Real Sense of Incredibly Good Cloth

Rare Joy: Lucien’s Buttercups Astonishingly Permanent

A Rare Failure: Royston King Made a Remark about this one which Can’t be Repeated. It’s of ‘a solicitor’

Winslow Homer: The Force of Nature. Superb

Winslow Homer: Fetish-ishing

Lucien Etching at London Art Fair: No, No, No

Winifred Nicholson: Utter Heaven

Another Winifred Nicholson: Great

Saturday 27th January 2023

Elements of the domestic burden omitted from my last entry – I forgot to mention: chimney lining project, massive expense and mess, yet to happen, haven’t been able to face it. Without linings I can’t light fires in my fireplaces. Marmalade making – massive pressure in January as always to make marm. How much longer will I be able to keep going? I’ve done three lots. Two more to go.

Robert Nevill had a star gig at the London Art Fayre, giving a discussion on Life and Art. I managed to get Press Entry so could have gone to the Champagne (prosecco) opening but was too weak as well as battling with the pizza dough. The Maharajah, as you know, is Hindu, so Vegetarian, like Rishi Sunak, the dear PM. I thought Jamie’s Deep Pizza Pie Cauliflower Cheese would be just the thing, especially in view of the cold weather. What could be more comforting than an all-white slab? Well, it rose all right – admittedly as a result of being put in the path of the blower heater on the floor. But the pizza bread aspect was unrelenting. A massive doughy expanse. What’s more I made so much was working through it for days. All January diet thoughts out the window.

Art has been the public theme for January. Lucien Freud, Winslow Homer, the London Art Fayre. My views are unacceptable, I’m afraid.

Joshua Baring attended Robert Nevill’s discussion at the London Art Fayre. He was somehow responsible for it in his new capacity as a major figure. Afterwards he produced a small plastic box containing a self-made piece of cake. It was a polenta cake, possibly from the River Cafe Cookery Book. He said he was cutting costs. The alternative was the Wolseley.  We all got a bit of the cake which was most refreshing after the rigours of being elevated by the discussion.

Briefly we visited some stands at the Art Fayre and standees dropped to the ground before Joshua Baring because he’s so influential.

Pizza dough Rising

The Finished Deep Pizza Pie Cauliflower Cheese

Sunday 22nd January 2023

In January the duties of the home come first although more engagements have been carried out than might appear.

Fabrics in my private bedroom have gone into a decline. Val is supposed to be edging the new piece of orange silk organza for the top end of the bed but the light bulb on his machine has gone.

We fight on. We fight to win.

The curtain has frayed in the sun and must be cut down.

Meanwhile I’ve been repairing the Indian cut-work bedspreads myself. Dreadful worry about the people who made them originally – such exploitation. All hand-stitched for which they would have got nothing. I’d forgotten about the white one in the drawer. It looks as if, about seven years ago,  I abandoned the task of sewing on new pieces of organza where the original backing had split. Well, I’ve got over that and it’s now back on the bed, but requiring constant vigilance. Where oh where are the white work specialists of yesteryear, especially in the Dutch 17th century – all those ruff-makers? Where are they when you need them?

The other, mauve cut-work bedspread will have to be re-edged. It’s taken about 3 weeks just to come up with a plan. Originally I thought to get more cotton organdie from Mucculloch and Wallis and have someone do it. But the hardest part of sewing, you know, is the cutting out. So some poor crone would have had to cut pieces on the bias (for edging this is vital) then sew them on by hand. Impossible. The cost. So my new direction is to acquire ready-made bias binding which is easily available and then see, believe it or not, if I can sew it on myself using Aunt Olive’s sewing machine which is in the dining room, posing as a table on which the TV rests.

The mauve cut-work bedspread is rather more robust than the white one under which I am lain at night now, feeling as though romping with the Turin Shroud or those 3 3/4 yards of black lace said to have belonged to the Madonna.

The beauty of fabrics – in so many ways the sacred part of the home.

But I tell you, it’s not easy to juggle all by oneself, with no staff. Acquisitions are still looking for bronzes and gilt-bronze for the hall shelf. I give hours to trawling the-saleroom.com then forget to bid. Or if remembering, go wrong. On Thursday I left a bid for an Empire inkstand – incredibly swirling, the main slab held up by winged horse-ladies etc. Now I’ve got to go to Hazlemere to fetch it. Just praying it won’t be horrid. Like a fool, I failed to bid for the pair of plain bronze vases with a single putti on each half way up which would have looked superb on my gilt brackets in the conservatory. They went for a manageable price. The previous week there was an obelisk in Ashford state with flowers inlaid I thought too much at £300 plus taxes. But now I find they go for £1000 plus from a dealer.

Anthony Mottram said, ‘Why do you want any more items for your shop?’ I said, ‘I’m thinking about a new sofa, or rather a George Smith sofa from eBay.’ Shopping never ends.  The more the home resembles a shop, the better.

I mustn’t forget the front bedroom (main guest) where new windows were installed and horrible thick white gunge put to fill where window meets wall. All that’s had to gouged out and it’s been a two-week battle to get a good straight edge. In fact I’ve had to settle for not entirely straight.

Marmalade production has also begun. Clothes, needless to say,  could not be overlooked while the sales in progress.

Looking back, I just don’t know how I’m getting through it all.

Hall Shelf – Acquisitions Still Struggling to Acquire. That Climbing Man £17 from National Gallery Shop, down from £26 in post-Christmas sale

Hall Shelf Challenge

Front Bedroom (main guest). Best I can Do. Don’t like the way new windows Stick out Into the Room. Edge Conspic

Indian Cut-Work Bedspread – Frayed Edge Challenge

My Private Bedroom: Frayed Curtain Horror

My Other Indian Cut-Work Bedspread, Brought out from Storage

Repairs to White Indian Cut-Work Bedspread. New Pieces of Silk Organza Sewn On