So, here are a couple of charming vampires I bumped into last night in Soho:



The creature on the right is the lovely boy I recently described as 'the precocious 25-year-old Culcutta-born "cultural entrepreneur" Pablo Ganguli, who became famous for his love affair with the British High Commissioner to Papua New Guinea when he was 18.'
That was for a pitch I sent last week to the Evening Standard because Pablo (now 25) and Tomas (on the left and not from Transylvania but Lithuania) are organising what they're billing as a 'cultural exchange thing' between Moscow and London (the 'thing' is my own addition) called the Mockba Festival on May 1-4. They're taking over people like Stephen Frears and Jake Chapman and the bloke who did Ray of Light for Madonna, William Orbit (I really like that album). Seeing that the Evening Standard is now owned by that Flob-a-lob-a-lob Russian guy- Lebedev? and seeing as Pablo and I both know Geordie Greig from two of Pablo's previous cultural jaunts to Mumbai and Morocco (Pablo ended up getting thrown out of Morocco by the authorities - he believes  they couldn't handle his penchant for gold lamé sarongs), we thought that Geordie, the newly-enthroned editor of the London Evening Standard, might want to run the story. On the Moscow trip, I also get the opportunity to do a reading from A Partial Indulgence (on May 3) with this chick called Amanda Eliasch who has written a book of 'erotic sonnets', snippets of which she sends me from time to time from her Blackberry:

What's it all about
This sticky
Fucking
Nightclub
That is such hell
The swearing
The fake
The bongo
Wongo...'

Amanda Blackberried Pablo as we were looking for a Soho bar to have a drink in, to ask if the hotel in Moscow they were putting her up in (5-star and Swiss) was any good. She's used to the good life, is Amanda, although it was a good query as I went on a trip to Moscow with Louis Vuitton a couple of years ago and it felt as if the Cold War had never ended. The hotel walls were paper thin and it sounded like there was a wife batterer next door. The Louis Vuitton PR chick was mortified (I didn't mind the hotel too much- it wasn't as bad as the traffic jams) and they sent me a cool red filofax with my initials embossed in gold when I got back to London as an 'apology' present. Ah yes, fashion press trips. J'Adore.
 
Meanwhile, back to last night in Soho and Pablo and Tomas wanted to find a 'cute' gay bar. It crossed my mind to take them to the Candy Bar on Carlise Street which I had cycled by earlier. As you probably won't know, this is the ONLY LESBIAN BAR in the whole of London- or at least the only one that is open 7 days a week and isn't situated in the middle of nowhere in some mugger's paradise. And this is 2009 for goodness sake! The Candy Bar is next door to the Private Eye offices and some straight pub. They have cleaned it up a bit since the days when I used to go there in the early 000s, but it's still pretty much like lesbian bars were in the 1950s ie while all the heteros were spilling out in to the streets in the pub next door, the lezzas were all rammed inside the sweaty insides of the bar in the cause of keeping a low profile and of not upsetting the horses too much.

It always used to piss me off when chicks brought guys into lesbian bars- albeit cute gay vampire boys (in fact, Tomas reminds me of a cute lesbian- which, as I told him, is a big compliment) so we ended up going to vaguely alternative-and-not-too-noisy gay watering hole, Ku, on Frith Street.
I had fun. I haven't been out in Soho for bloody ages and I even served as a decoy duck for one of the younger members of our group. Tomas is only 17 and was worried they wouldn't let him in. Luckily, they were distracted by Grannie Grimble me as we walked over the threshold that there was no problem about Tomas's age. Pablo ordered a double Baileys and Tomas had something called a 'Frangelina'? because, as they confided, they didn't really like alcohol so they always drank stuff that tastes like sweets.  I'm not sure if I got 'Frangelina' right but it smells and tastes like biscuits soaked in sweet sherry. I quite took to it and advised the boys to try a 'Slippery Nipple' next time which I used to drink back in the day at the Candy Bar - I think it's Baileys and Cointreau and Sambuca (it was big with the cool 'Back of the Bus' girls.  (I just looked Frangelina  up and apparently it is called 'Frangelico' and is 'the original Hazlenut liqueur').

I have to say, it was quite novel hanging out with a couple of  spring chickens who don't like booze. In my Biche days in Paris, it was the thing to get legless all the time and I didn't like alcohol either so I used to drink vodka with orange because then you couldn't taste the the vodka.

Actually, now I come to think of it I HAVE been out in Soho already this week. Twice in fact. On Tuesday night, I met up at the Soho Hotel with some old journo friends (in the quiet room by reception- not many people know that you can avoid the ghastly 'Refuel' bar which is filled with sweaty young suits and come to this quiet room with an Upstairs Downstairs vibe). One of our group was a fantastically scary fashion writer, who had just flown back from Rome where she learned the gossip that Pope Benedict had just married two high society lesbians in a secret ceremony in the Vatican. Good one, right? Another of our company, a chick from the Telegraph, called me the next day, to ask if I remembered what the high soc lezzas were called (the Telegraph loves any story that involves Catholics).  And of course I' remembered. As I said to her, as a big lezza, I always remember these things (although, as per tomorrow's G2 I am only a 'bisexual lesbian'). The ladies in question are  Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis and Alessandra Borghese and you can read a story about them at  http://www.vanityfair.com/fame/features/2006/06/princesstnt200606
That's the weird thing about the internet right?  I could never say  that Prinny Gloria and her Borghese gal pal are really big lezzas posing as 'good friends,' in The Telegraph but it seems I can here... Hmmm, maybe that 's one of those statements called 'Hubris' and I'll be kidnapped by Italian Lesbian Avengers tonight and get taken to the big pussy bumpers' Roman ranch where they'll tie me up and do naked nun frottage in front of me and whisper filthy lezza poetry in my ears until I beg for forgiveness. Sorry I have no pictures to post of this, as yet.

One picture I do have is of my other outing in Soho this week- Monday night when I did a reading at a 23 Romilly Street at a bar called The Green Fingernail:



Not sure about those drainpipe trousers now... Meanwhile, the other readers were poets including Salena Godden who runs this 'Book Club Boutique', an Irish poet called Joe Duggan who did a great poem about taking a would-be girlfriend to Bingo on the bus in Ireland and Murray Lachlan Young- that poet who was signed up for a million quid by EMI in 1997- performing a funny piece about Keith Richards falling out of a coconut tree. Salena is a very generous MC - she said she liked A Partial Indulgence because it felt 'trippy' and I liked that. It reminded me of an obsession of mine when I was writing the novel- about those times in life when you feel as if you are on drugs  because reality becomes heightened in some way. Carmen Costello has this sensation at one point and it feels like jet lag, mixed with being mugged (when everything goes into slow motion) mixed with falling in love (when everything seems to have meaning). But I should have added also 'reading to a large audience', doing a live recording in a radio studio and, most wacky of all, doing live TV. I used to review the European papers for Sky when I worked at The European- nothing about wars or political stuff - just cats stuck in trees in Reims, a man who'd grown a huge melon in Andalucia, that sort of thing. The thing about doing 'live' stuff is that you can understand why all those TV personalities are big coke heads- because it is so fantastically exciting being 'live' in front of 70 million viewers' and when you come off air you are desperate to keep up that level of intensity. As Gore Vidal once said, 'Never turn down the chance to have sex or to appear on live TV.'

I've just got back from recording Loose Ends at Broadcasting House - it'll be on tonight at 6.15 on Radio 4. I think I said something about Bernard Manning and Sharon Stone and, of course, I rolled out the 'I was only a fish and chip man's daughter but I knew my plaice' angle. The Doves were on singing a song from their new album - something about a Kingdom of Rust- it was good. And David Starkey was on talking about Henry VIII- he's got a new show on TV about him next week. The traditional Loose Ends thing to do afterwards apparently is to go to the pub so we did and it was here that I got the gossip from a BBC insider that Russell Brand is a bully and once he asked his producer to get him a coffee cup so he could pee into it- whereas he could easily have gone to the loo. It was this bullying behaviour, my source told me, that was responsible for him getting that lame joke about sex with Manuel's niece past the 25-year-old producer and on to the air. David Starkey also loosened up under the influence of a whole bottle of Merlot and I overheard him asking Clive Anderson how the women in the Women's Hour section of the BBC were doing. "The Bearded ladies, I call them,' he said.
He then told me that he was impressed I'd come out with my fish and chip credentials  because, 'In my day we didn't talk about that sort of thing although my father was a turner' (he made metal parts for washing machines) 'and my mother used to scrub floors'. He consoled me for being in the Daily Mail today (see 'Journalism'). He said, 'when the Daily Mail said that I was the rudest man in Britain, it increased my income by £100,000 a year.'
Here is a pic I took of us just after the recording:



And here is a pic of an autograph hunter lady who was in front of Broadcasting House (with a bunch of middle aged men wearing- seriously- anoraks). I think this chick was after Starkey's autograph rather than the Doves who we have pictured underneath her:






The one with the jaunty scarf is a guitarist and the other one is the keyboard player. On the way down in the lift after the recording, they confided that they both went out on the tiles last night. To a strip club near Nobu in Mayfair and they couldn't remember anything after that- apart from the fact that they'd used their credit card 'What!' scoffed the Doves lead singer (whose pic I took but it is too unflattering to show). 'And what are you going to tell your bank manager when that comes through? That "Chesty Bumford" is your accountant?' Bless. They're all off on tour now and they said that's how you had to make money now since everyone (er...hum) downloads music for free now. And touring only allows you to break even, they reckoned.
Oh, and we had free frozen pasties and sausage rolls to eat in the pub where we went afterwards. And as it happens I'm reading a book on pasties at the moment that my friend Helen sent me from Cornwall. Apparently the pasty had it's heyday in Henry VIII's time when they made them with venison and spices and orange peel. David S didn't seem to know much about this although he did confide that he really wanted to go to Queens' College, Cambridge and not Fitzwilliam where he ended up (that's the modern place and frankly, Jesus, where I went is much cooler) but he put the apostrophe in the wrong place when he applied to Queens'...

...And on to the Whitechapel party last night to celebrate them excavating into the attic and opening up a few more rooms. Not  many celebs - in fact Janet Street Porter was the most famous person there. But I got talking to the new diary chick from the Telegraph, Caroline Mtehrani, who stood out among all the other black-clad art types in a big red dress and calavry boots. (She is organising a break-away group this year at the Hay literary festival, by the way. Called The Hay Philosophy Festival it's on from May 21-31). Caroline said the art party world was a bit of a funny business to write about because if you go to a fashion party you'll see Viv and Manolo B and that Jody Harsh DJ tranny but frankly, who do you ever see at an art  party?
'Everyone looks like students or sordid business men' she said.

And it was true. At this one there was that dealer who looks like Anthony Warhol, there was Tim Noble, one half of the 'Tim 'n Sue' art duo who's looking more and more like a skinny Ian Dury in his Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick era' and there was the former banker turned art consultant who looks like the evil toad from Dangermouse. Greenblack said quite an interesting thing when I bumped into him in the new British Council room. (This is the best new room- a kind of crash course in modern and contemporary art. They've got  Lucien Freud, Patrick Hamilton and Sarah Lucas's fried eggs photo- which turns out to have cost the Brit Council £540.00 when they bought it in 1999. And this is the cool thing, you can find out how much each pic cost to buy- the Freud Girl With Roses cost £157 and 10shillings in 1948.

(I saw Lucien Freud in the Woolsely on Monday night, by the way.  He was with a girl who we reckoned must have been under 20. The vibe was of an estranged uncle taking his exciteable niece out for lunch. Not sure who this chick was, he's been painting her for ages apparently. She looked not dissimilar to the Girl With Roses. Meanwhile he is 87 years old but he could have passed for 65. My art dealer friend tells me this is because, 'He absolutely loves sex.')
 
Meanwhile, back at the Whitechapel, Greenback was wheezing that the British Council also bought a lot of crap which they've still got stuffed in their cellars and aren't daring to show to anyone.
So, a good night out on the whole and I tried not to be too smug about the fact that everyone was drinking Hungarian Pinot Grigio whereas I've scored 60 bottles of Ruinart champagne for my bash (date and location, as yet a secret). I think I'm more excited about scoring the Ruinart (Sharon Stone's favourite beverage) than I am about writing 'the bloody novel' as I'm now referring to it as. Meanwhile, the Whitechapel party could have been taking place in the Milk and Honey year of 2005 because they drank Hungarian Pinot Grigio back then too at the Whitechapel. But  they have got a really cool new bookshop although I couldn;t see A Partial Indulgence there. I explained a bit about it to the German guy who runs it. 'I got a lot of my research material from covering parties for Harper's Bazaar for 4 years,' I said, trotting out my old line.
'Oh, so it is about parties is it?' he said with a wink and I could see words like 'chick lit' and 'is my bum too big in this' flashing across his mind. I said, 'well, I do have a great Ortolan sex scene' but his attention was distracted at that moment by the Andy Warhol lookalike walking past.

Anyway, I have Dame Judy gossip for you (post Madame de Sade dinner at Sheeky's the other night with David Walliams - that man has big hands- and Neil Tennent. But now I have to finish a story for Ireland's biggest selling Irish women's mag. It's called Image and I think there's something on the cover about it being for 'intelligent women'. I have to write a piece being upbeat about today's art parties. I think I'll write about the Haunch of Venison opening the other week- loads of Perrier Jouet- although everyone seemed a bit guilty about drinking it...

NO, this isn't a late April Fool but it's just been announced that I will be performing at the Hay literary festival on May 30 at 10PM with the one and only Immodesty Blaize and her famous (ish) rocking horse. Check her out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8iamgR7hx0

I'm thinking that people might find it a bit hard to curl up in bed with a cup of tea and a nice read after that but I could be wrong. The rocking horse thing will be the first 10 minutes of our slot because Immodesty (who is very sexy and smart in 'real life' - she was the best dressed at that Harper's Bazaar 'Viv Vomit' party the other week and whose debut novel, Tease, has got some great one-liners in it) can only survive in her 18 inch waist corset for 10 minutes. She will leave the stage after the tits and feathers extravagaza and I will apparently chat to the moderator Julian Clary while she  loosen up a bit behind the curtains. I think I'm going to read out Chapter Five of A Partial Indulgence, where hustler chamber maid Carmen Costello meets raffish (I keep using that word) art dealer, Charles Frederick de Vere for the first time. There's a reference to Hollywood waxes and the line 'I wondered if I should tell him that where I come from, 'art' means 'dirty'.
Wish me luck though. The experience might be a little like going on stage after the Rolling Stones have performed...
 Talking of Chapter Five, I will be premiering this next Monday night in Soho when I'm doing a reading at a gig called Book Club Boutique at, wait for it, 'Dick's Club' or The Green Fingernail, 23 Romilly Street, Soho, London on Monday, April 6 at 7pm. Entrance is free, you get FREE GIN and there will also be some 'erotic poetry' readings. I told the current party ed of Harper's Bazaar about this  Green Fingernail reading and she said, 'oh, how exciting, I'm coming!' and this from the woman who's used to going to Sharon Stone's house on a regular basis. I'm telling you, all those fashion bunnies think the book world is one big exciting underground orgy.
One other date for you: Loose Ends on Radio 4 this Saturday, April 4 at 18.15-19.00. I think they want me to churn out more 'My Life Telling Elizabeth Taylor "No, Liz Not Another Bloody Party- I've Had Them Up To Here!'
But 'm going to try and turn it away from that angle  and back onto art. I'm hoping to be interviewed by Arthur Smith who once invited me to walk  up a hill at the Hay Literary Festival to do something very exciting that did not even involve a rocking horse.

Hang books! Hang being a novelist! I've thrown myself into plastering the bathroom walls to try and forget it all. That artex covering has been bugging me for a while and I reckon plastering can't be that different from icing a cake. I checked out those You Tube videos of plasterer geezers showing you how to do it for a lark with their mate's camera on their tea break ('Yeah, well, the thing about plastering is that you have to have the abillity to think of sex and football at the same time! Get it! Fucking brilliant!')
and I am determined to have none of these people in my house. It's like men cooking- they all demand tomato de-seeders and special spatulas and a set of precisely-ordered chopping knives because they're terrified of performing such a low status (and potentially feminising) job and all they're making is beans on toast.

Meanwhile, here is a picture of a house I iced earlier...

So, I'm really over journalism this week. Jake and I did this code name 'Betty Bothways' article about bisexuality for the Saturday Guardian. Well, it was supposed to be for the Saturday Guardian but then they wanted us to add in 'a few light anecdotes' about what we did in bed...The bloody Guardian, I ask you! Now it's apparently appearing in G2 but it's been chopped right down and we're getting £250 a head for it. There you have it- scraping out your innards and laying them on a plate for Jo Public and you get paid a smidgeon of what you get for writing an article about real estate for the Mail on Sunday. Oh well, keep on trucking, as they say. Besides, I've been inspired this week by a book by Michelle Tea called Valencia- real dykey, out on the edge of San Francisco, having sex with crusty marxist lesbians and peeing in public sort of stuff. Kind of like a grungy Biche. Then I watched Tea on You Tube and that self confidence thing- even if you are a 'cult author' ie you don't sell many books- is very inspiring. Also, I watched Rent last night- and it wasn't as bad as I thought. All that stuff about pushing yourself to achieve more and more when you have very little money and you know you are going to die any minute of Aids is inspiring too. As my friend Pete Rook says, 'Keep angry, keep ranting, in a word full of morons and self-satisfied imbeciles.' Oh, and I think I might have hustled some Champagne for the launch party (it is SO much more satisfying to hustle stuff than be a schmuck like everyone and pay for it so, hey, maybe it doesn't matter about the Guardian pittance...) On a lighter note check out these web sites if you fancy a little down time: www.me-me-me.tv (run by the guys who used to edit BOYZ back in the 1990s when it made you laugh. They sometimes have problems with chick stuff- (actually, why don’t you email them, telling them what happened at your last smear test) but on the whole, this site rocks. http://www.novaplanet.com/radio-nova/cetait-koi-ce-titre.php The French radio station Radio Nova that I used to listen to when I was living in Paris in the 1990s and I’m glad is still going. Brilliant music while you work and they put up the names of the tracks as they play them so you can download them for free elsewhere. I know, I know, it’s really bad Karma but quelquefois it's alright... And here's a pic of Jean Paul Gaultier just because I like him:

So, I think I found my blog voice and I think it might be thanks to ‘Viv -Vomitgate’ which hit the headlines in The Times and The Evening Standard this week. Check out the full reports on the ‘Journalism’ section of this site but here’s a quick summary: “March 17, 2009. Punk queen sharpens her knife We never knew that Vivienne Westwood was such a keen cultural critic. Sweeping into the Harper’s Bazaar party for Women in Theatre at the Ivy Club, the punk grand dame headed for Stephanie Theobald, the style writer and novelist. “I don’t like your novels,” said Viv, who had been sent an advance copy of A Partial Indulgence, Theobald’s latest, a racy expose of the London art market. “And this one is like vomit coming at you off the page actually. I mean . . . I really hate your writing.” “I might use that as a cover quote,” said Theobald, who escaped further punishment when the designer spotted Alex Jennings, who played the Prince of Wales in The Queen. “That was an absolutely terrible film . . .” What happened was that I’d got myself invited to the Bazaar Ivy Club party last Sunday night (my mate Frances runs the party pages there now and I sometimes help her out on the quotes front). At one point, Lucy, the editor, waved at me to come over. She was chatting to some chick with her back to me who had long pinky/yellowy hair and I thought it must be Pam Hogg. Pammy’s another punk legend who now designs fantastic scary clothes under the Hogg Couture label (http://www.myspace.com/hoggcouture) , is a brilliant DJ and often has a nice looking younger man on her arm. But this woman wasn’t Pammy, it was Dame Vivienne Westwood her very self. I was delighted as I’d sent a copy of A Partial Indulgence to her assistant Tizer (I know, perfect name for Viv’s assistant, right?) just before Christmas. Viv is a known fan of the 18th century and my art dealer, Charles Frederick de Vere, starts out selling paintings by Boucher and Fragonard. When Viv saw me, she said, ‘funnily enough, Tizer just gave me A Partial Indulgence yesterday!’ Good start, I’m thinking. And then she launches into the mad vomit thing. Funnily enough - maybe it was the trembly Cheshire accent - but even as she was spewing out the endless diatribe (and she’d only read the first page!) she sounded like some kind of gentle Granny Grimble character and it was kind of endearing (although my eyes did start stinging at one point and I thought, ‘Oh no, am I going to cry?’) I didn’t. I was thinking of saying something about her last menswear collection but I didn't do that either. In fact, I hope I’m that obnoxious when I’m 68. The Times diarist guy said I should invite her to my book launch (April 21) for round two so I’ll have to see how desperate I am for famous guests (will be writing about the scary launch party soon…) To be honest, I’ve always found Viv to be brilliant value for money. I once went on a trip to a 6-star resort in the Maldives with her and hubby Andreas for a Bazaar story. On the first night, the hotel flew in oysters all the way from Paris for our dinner. Now, I love oysters but we’d all just spent 16 hours on a hideous plane ride and I wouldn’t have wanted to eat me - let alone an oyster. Viv was sitting next to me at the table and I advised her not to eat them because they were bound to be dead by now. She looked surprised. ‘Are they normally alive?’ she said. ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘When you squeeze lemon juice on the edges you should see them squirm a little.’ She narrowed her eyes before gravely picking up a lemon wedge and squeezing it slowly over one of the oysters. She carried on staring at the thing for a few seconds then turned back to me looking troubled. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘They’re dead.’ Viv hadn’t been on holiday for 40 years but she seemed to enjoy herself and succeeded in hardly getting any tan during the whole week. She passed the time trying to pin down the meaning of life- Rousseau’s ‘Noble Savage’ was her beach read. ‘My feeling,’ she said the next night at dinner, ‘is that the whole of the French Revolution was a mistake because it made people believe they’re equal whereas in fact it was just another system to turn people into automatons.’

Here's a pic of me and Viv at the airport on the way home:

People keep telling me that the best way to sell a novel is through a 'blog' (which I think means a 'diary'). Well, I'm still trying to find my blog 'voice' as we say in the ancient novel writing game so stay tooned... (With any luck, finding my blog voice wont take as long as the time it took me to find the voice to write A Partial Indulgence....)