Friday 27th August 2010

You’re dying to know how we all got on in the Umbrian villa.

Poor Little Rich Gays are clever, driven (how else did they get all that money?), off their heads, brave, competitive, superb, absolutist, fractured, valiant, silly, enduring –  surely more than one in a holiday villa and crisis is inevitable.

A writer friend of Robert Nevil’s, on being told there would be several hire cars at my and Prince Dmitri’s Umbrian villa, said: ‘Good for rows,’ meaning a person could get away.

In 1994, at Il Poggino, near Siena,  there was the fearsome risotto gun-boat incident when Bruce McBain, my architect, challenged the approach to stirring of Rufus Pitman, the novelist and critic. Further back, in 1974, I beat Anthony Mottram about the head when he failed to get a door open quickly enough. That was in Greece, but before we really were Poor Little Rich Gays, so maybe doesn’t count.

A possible solution to the problem of villa hiss and scratch is offered by  Robin Smallmeal, former friend, head of landfill in this country or whatever, £450,000 a year but an employee.

Do try this yourself.

The object is to achieve total power, so there are no scenes. But this is not granted only by paying for everything, although this is the vital first step.  In addition, you should appear on superficial acquaintance, as Smallmeal does, just about the most inadequate and uneasy person anyone is ever likely to meet. Then nobody will notice your steely brooding exercise of control. Indeed they might even feel sorry for you. Your strange silent  potency is made absolute by doing absolutely nothing, expressing few preferences, going nowhere, saying little, taking an interest in even less and lying a great deal on a chaise longue.

This way you will have even the most volatile and superior of Poor Little Rich Gays fetching and carrying, their chins scraping the ground with obligation.

The only drawback with this method is that it is the equivalent of death and will lead inevitably, as in my case, to the sudden brutal termination of friendship.

But you may prefer it this way.

Come back later for what really happened in Umbria.

Watch out for Those Scissors !