Ah, the charm of a French accent. I was at the launch of the new Givenchy perfume at Harrods last week- linked in with the launch of the new Veuve Cliquot rose (that should, naturally, be accent acute but you can't do accents on this blog thing I use..).  The Champagne woman was talking about the grapes growing on 'the slops' but it was the older French woman (in really cool high waisted- one would presume- Givenchy trousers) who described the aromas of the new perfumes- there are four of them: Ange ou Demon (orange), Very Irresistible (Rose) Amarige (Mimosa) and Organza (Jasmine).
The orange one was my favourite as it smelled of having your head stuck in a bourgeoise semi-alcoholic housewife's crepe-y cleavage. (It's supposed to smell clean and fresh, like early-picked Egyptian flowers ('if you peak zem up at moon time zey will be too full and voluptuous...).I think the flowers in my whiff of the perfume must have been picked very late at night. There was deffo a demon in that bottle..
The rose one was supposed smell like 'If you open a Moroccan lezza bag'.
In fact, the whole effect was supposed to be 'spicey, naughty, lezzary and 'oney-type of sensation.'
Those early morning perfume launches are a funny business. You're sitting there at 9 in the morning in a corner of Harrods lit like a police station, drinking pink Champagne, eating those mini croissants that don't taste like proper French ones and worrying if you're smartly-enough dressed. It feels sort of extra terrestrial. It reminded me of going to a Jill Sander show in Milan a few years ago at 9 in the morning and all the journos sat there with stone faces wearing sunglasses. It was very bright with loud music and models coming out of the curtain like weird-looking creatures emerging from Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde pods...
We got two bottles of the perfume to take home and a bottle of the pink rose which money wise, if I cashed it all in on Ebay, amounts pretty much to what I'm being paid next week (£150) to give a talk at City University novel writing MA class about the 'Systematic Derangement of the Senses" ie how to write druggy stuff well.  Any takers?

So, the report is out and he really did hang himself.  The morning of his mother's funeral. From a wardrobe at his house in Flat 1, 7 Green Street W1K. We're not told what with. A tie? A belt? And there was a suicide note although '... the beauty that lies under the rotten fruit!!!!!!!!!!!!' that he howled in Twitter despair 3 days before he died made sense to me.
I met and interviewed McQueen many times but, given the current circumstance, my chat with him at a party at Maxim's in Paris in October 2004 make the most beautiful rotten fruit sense. It was during my early days doing the party watch for Harper's Bazaar and I used to go round getting all the celebs stoned and asking silly questions. This one was: 'What do you think happens when we die?'
When I asked  Dita Von Teese, she gave a visible jolt of horror before replying 'I'd like to believe we all go up to heaven and play dress-up all day, but I think that life on earth is...pretty much it.'
I then asked McQueen who was chatting to a couple of black dyke mates he'd flown over from London. Now McQueen, as people will tell you, could be gruff and snarly at the best of times but the what-happens-when-we-die question seemed to please him. He straightened up and his face lit up in a beam. 'I'll go to purgatory,' he said. 'And then I'll probably go up.'
A cute thoughts. Always the poor-boy-done-good, always striving for a better life and even after death assuming that he would be cutting God's coat...
I did a long interview with him in 2003 for Harper's where he was 3 days late for the interview (a bender, the PR confessed) and when he turned up he started out snarly and gruff and touchingly inarticulate. That was his way, he'd stammer out a few jerky, stacatto lines of cursing and muttering and then he'd come out with something incredibly heart-felt. When I asked him about his dark vision he snapped, 'of course my work's edgy. I grew up seeing 3 sisters in abusive relationships. One of them was nearly strangled to death. I haven't watched it on TV; I've been there. All women are warriors and I've got compassion for that.'
As an after thought, he added:
'You can't be a rebel all your life or you end up like James Dean- dead.'
Right, I have to go now and write a story about dykey cycling clothes for 10 magazine. I just have to say that all those fashion people who've come out of the woodwork now to say how shocked and saddened they are by the death of their friend kind of pisses me off. Everyone's good friends with everyone when they're dead. To state the obvious- where were they in his tormented final week? And what's with the whole Twitter thing? All those 'followers'  but no friends. Like the case of the Johnson and Johnson heiress, Casey Johnson whose over-dosed body was left to rot for 3 days in January before she was found by her twitter-obsessed girlfriend, Tila Tequila. Hey ho. Now that McQueen and Isabella Blow are dead, it seems as if the (fashion) world is destined to become more and more boring and homogenised. Lady Gaga has a lot on her shoulders...

'Times are hard" as someone said to me this morning and that made me feel a bit better about the nightmare of last night at the Louis Vuitton party for Chris Ofili at the Tate Britain when I nearly got thrown for daring to ask Bill Nighy which country in the world he'd like to visit before it got destroyed.

This isn't the actual pic of Bill from last night because I was soon marched away from him. But this is pretty much what he looked like, minus the bow tie. His ex wife, Diana Quick, the one from Brideshead is nothing but nice.
Meanwhile,  was a bit of a weird do (at the Tate Britain- the nice Tate not the nasty children-ridden Tate Modern) because the invite was one of the biggest stiffies - all in black -that I'd recieved for ages but there were no paps outside  even though inside there was Jude Law and Sienna Miller and Bill Bloody Nighy. Actually, I got there at the same time as Jude Law who'd just been delivered by a limo tout seul and not a single flash light in sight. The figure of 500 euros was flashing in front of my eyes- I do this celebrity page for a new Euro eco  mag called Above (billed by them as 'the green Vanity Fair') and I've found this flash button on my birthday camera that makes everyone look really glamorous, so I take pics and write up the quotes for Above and i's a bit of a nightmare but most celebs know how to play the game. Anyway, first I went up to Sienna Miller who had also arrived toute seule but then, strangely enough, had linked up with Jude inside.


I said hi to Sienna and reminded her that we'd met (in Venice for the film festival in 2005, as a matter of fact, when she was really cool and sat around with a group of strangers smoking spliff). Her face was slightly tanned last night and she looked very cute and young and freckly (and in love- even though they'd been delivered in seperate cars it was obvious they were TOTALLY back together- very sexy actually, pretending not to be with  someone when you're desperately in love with them. Make the most of it, Sienna cos you'll soon get bored of him).I wished I'd had that superpower that Babs Windsor has in Carry On Spying to take a pic of them together just through blinking my eyes - hopefully now they've come up with the ipad they'll invent that now. There was an in-house photographer but nobody else was allowed to take pics- as you will see later.
Anyway, Sienna said she remembered me, but then, as I came out with the blurb about how I was working for this new 'green Vanity Fair' thing and could I ask her a question about which country she'd like to visit before it got destroyed, I realised this was going to be a no-go. I was being way too long in my explanation and I could see the boredom creeping up in her eyes as I told her about how the world was soon going to be destroyed as my editor had briefed me...
Poor thing, me nobbling her big secret date with Jude.  She was very polite and said could she answer me later. Jude gave me a pissed off look as they walked off to see the Ofili exhibit. I guess because I hadn't said 'Hey Jude , nice Sherlock Holmes film - you were amazing.' Still, he did look good too. When I accidentally bumped into him post-limo on the darkly lit front steps of the Tate, I thought he was some trendy 20-something Hoxton type in his black jeans and boots and Dior Homme jacket. That must be secret love for you..
Anyway, so they wandered off to see the exhibit  and I spotted a skinny guy in thick rimmed specs- it was Bill Nighy from that flop movie, The Boat That Rocked. He looked quite flirtatiously at me as I went up to him, thinking maybe I'd come for a chat but then when I came out with the Save The World stuff he did the equivalent of punching me in hte face by starting to say, 'Actually no' (he was also in Love Actually), 'actually no I don't want to talk to you.' The glossy blonde next to him ('marinated' is a word Marc Quinn used earlier this week to me about Pamela Anderson's vibe) started to - what- fulminate? Just looked that word up in the dictionary and yes, it means 'to explode violently or flash like lightning'. Thats what she did. And then, a few minutes later another marinated blonde comes up and told me (very politely, as it goes' that these Louis Vuitton events are not for press and theat is how come they get all the celebs to come. Fair enough. After all, the Chris Ofili expo is only there becasue of all the money Louis Vuitton earns making handbags and stilettos (they're sponsoring it all). It's clever really and good for business: hook up with a  bunch of scrubby East End poets for the night and even though you actually just make frocks and handbags, you will be linked to immortality.
Still, having been told off felt kind of  crap as I went into a big gallery to listen to Chris Ofili introduce a bunch of 'street poets' who were about to perform. There I was drinking a coupe of Dom Perignon and it could have been Cava (mind you, drinking champagne when you've still got gum in your mouth is not ideal). I sat there amongst a bunch of what used to be called 'ladies who lunch' ie glossy hair, size 6, Christian Louboutin stiletto boots looking at the fine knitting on my jumper. It was given to me by my friend in Paris, the brilliantly talented Adam Jones (www.adamjones.fr). He trained in knitwear and was the number one man at Dior when John Galliano was going through a.. tricky partying period- and all the collections turned out as knitwear).
Anyway I was looking at the intricate weave of it, thinking that some lady in some factory had spent hours making this, thinking that some nice society lady would be wearing it out for her big night at the ball (Adam Jones doesn't come cheap) and yet here I was at the big ball and I was feeling terrible becasue I'd been told of by the PR woman for trying to take a pic of Bill Nighy to pay my mortgage (in a flat above a welfare tennant who's turned his flat into a marijuana farm, buy the way) and now I was forcing down Dom Perignon aware that I should spit out my gum yet chewing it kind of made me feel safe and having to listen to a bunch of 'street' rap poet friends of Chris Ofili who the lunching ladies were giggling nervously at.

Still, some good things did come out of the night. The last chick performance poet was brilliant. Called Kate Tempest, she has loads of cockiness and confidence and put some surprising thoughts and words together as opposed to the regular street poetry subjects of gangs and shagging.
Rebecca Warren the brilliant Turner nominated sculptress was there looking very foxy all in black, looking for a fag smoking partner to go outside with. I had a chat with Tim Noble about how I'd like to kill a pig- not just the killing bit but the preparing it properly for sausages etc.

The caviar was good too - Osetra- the so-called elite of caviar- a firmer texture than the mroe delicate Beluga. You're supposed to have it on blinis with sour cream and boiled eggs but I held off on the boiled eggs. The young East End poets just looked at the caviar bar nervously and excitedly and glugged the Dom Perignon instead. But who knows what they'll make of this night later on. Remember that quote from Chekov's The Seagull:

‘It is as dangerous for society to attract and indulge authors as it is for grain-dealers to raise rats in their granaries.’

Morning all, just a small post to remind you that I've not disappeared altogether. I wasn't sure you'd be interested in hearing from me if I hadn't had any close encounters  with any famous people- and a haven't of late (big sigh of relief).
Actually, no, I tell a lie. I did recently go to Veuve Cliquot's Hennessy Gold cup (that's a horse race in Berkshire). The waitresses were very cute -the French maid look is always a winner:

 Champagne wasn't allowed because Hennessy is cognac and they have to promote that.  This was a bit of a bore, but they did have this red coloured cocktail with ginger and apple in that hid the taste. Funnily enough, the only celeb who had enough push to get bubbly was Cilla Black who said she'd leave unless she had some so they sneaked a bottle up from under the counter like a butcher passing over best end of neck to the brassy blonde on rationning day. I don't have any pics of Cilla (she bet on a horse called Barber's Shop, 'Cos, like I lived over a barber's shop when I was a kid') but here is one of that Henry bloke- the Tory's son who was being paid by his dad to put on parties.


Conway, that's the name. He's the one on the left and describes himself as 'blonde, bouncy and one for the boys'. We had a nice chat about wearing fur and how the races was one of the few times you could wear it in Britian without fearing for your life. I have a black fur hat I bought in Moscow - possibly made of cat- and I've always fancied a bucket load of green paint over it- think it'd look good. The bloke on the right is his friend who works as a lawyer in the city.
But back to the breathing thing- that's where I spent my Xmas- eating beetroot salad on this beathing holiday in Lanzarote (www.breathguru.com). You imagine there's a balloon in your belly and take in massive lots of oxygen very quickly and it makes you feel like you're in drugs only without the paranoia. It's amazing, man. I was cynical too to start with but you can do it for free yourself once you've learned the method. It's called Transformational Breathing. Here's me going down hill on a bike after one of the sessions. I'm still working on the turban look...

It's not so much that I hate them, it's more that there seem to be mice all over the shop at the moment.  Take the invite for Stephen Webster's 50th birthday party designed by his friend Tracey Emin:


While everyone else at the party was going on about 'punk poet' John Cooper Clarke who also contributed to the birthday boy's proceedings at Tyringham Hall by doing a stand-up rant (I can't remember what he said as I'd just had a spliff in the garden next to the 'largest reflecting pool in Europe') but I do remember admiring Tracey's little banquetting mice invite. They reminded me of a cute little drawing of a couple of elephant trunks snuggled up to each other that she sold off at a Terence Higgins Trust auction a couple of years ago which, when I went to have a closer look, turned out not to to be elephants at all but something called 'Arse Fucking'.
When I later interviewed her about this, she smiled and said, "Yes, it does look a bit elephant trunks". I don't think the above mice have anything to do with gayboy sodomy but I could be wrong. 

I saw Tracey last Sunday at fellow artist Sue Webster's birthday party (no relation to rock and roll jeweller Stephen) in Soho at Mark Hix's new fish restaurant. Among stars such as Kate Moss, Bella Freud and Nick Cave, Tracey was almost mouse-like in her low-key-ness. She talked  to me about her cat, Docket and how she was loving her new house in Le Lavendou in the South of France. She had brought a couple of cuddly  friends along to the party with her - her neighbours from Le Lavendou. A bashful French man called Michel wore a Guernsey jumper and had rosy cheeks and was pleasingly hamster-ish.

The second mouse incident this week was in Soho on Thursday night at an art opening for which I received this invite:


The artist is called Charlotte Cory and she takes lots of old Victorian photographs and sticks animal heads on them. I'm not convinced about it as art although it did remind me of that Monty Python mouse sketch:

Man: Well... I was about seventeen and some mates and me went to a party, and, er... we had quite a lot to drink... and then some of the fellows there ... started handing ... cheese around ... and well just out of curiosity I tried a bit ... and well that was that.
Interviewer:    And what else did these fellows do?
Man:    Well some of them started dressing up as mice a bit ...
Interviewer:    And what was your reaction to this?
Man    Well I was shocked. But gradually I come to feel that I was more at ease ... with other mice.

The other good thing about the mouse suits art show was that I bumped into David Hoyle AKA the fantastic Divine David. Turns out he's doing a show at the Chelsea Theatre all about Freud from October 21. Apparently he has Freud's actual couch which will be the centre piece of the show. I like his quote in the Independent: "I'm happy to say I'm multifaceted," admits Hoyle. "Some of my facets are blinding bright and others are coal-black. It all depends on where the light is."

Here Hoyle is at the mouse art show (in front of a couple of rabbits having a drink):


Anyway, enough of the mice thing. My point is that Pixie and Dixie are back. Let's give them a big hand:

So, I have two more psychics’ phone numbers in my address book which means that London Fashion Week must just have ended. The first one I got from Daisy Bates (whose dad was Ralph Warleggan in Poldark and whose hair is all falling out from dying it blonde for an appearance in Lost)  at the Harper’s Bazaar party at the Natural History Museum on Monday night. Daisy once hooked me up with Lady Di's psychic. I’ve just looked the new one's name up and I have her down as ‘Helen Psychic’. You have to send her a photo- she can even ‘read’ J-pegs apparently- and then she tells you all about what the person is doing now. I think the people in the photos have to be already dead though...
I got the second psychic info later that night from PR Supremo Miss Meena Khera going up in the lift to the Paul Smith party (to celebrate him having designed a limited edition Evian bottle – its got lots of coloured squiggles around the outside). Actually, I know this psychic- she’s called Miraid and she does an interesting thing that is like reiki with a big of contact your dead relatives thrown in. She also doubles as a jewellery designer. Meena said Miraid had given her a necklace that turned her neck red for a week but that also brought out a load of bad stuff from her life. This is a typical kind of fashion week conversation and it is why I like fashion people so much better than product design dullards. I was at the V &A last night for the Wallpaper party (part of London Design Week) and I asked Alasdhair Willis (Stella McCartney’s husband) what he’d been doing lately that was a bit eco. He said, ‘Oh , well, I’ve been building an arboritum, actually,’ then  he looked at his friend and chuckled as if I wouldn’t have the slightest idea what an arboritum was, let alone know how to spell it.  Ok, so actually you spell it ‘Arboretum’ but I did at least know it was some kind of mini forest thing. It reminded me of the time I asked Ben Fogle what his favourite dinosaur was and he turned and chuckled, ‘Pterodactyl, actually, although you probably won’t know how to spell it.’ I nearly told him that there is a character in my second novel, Sucking Shrimp, who is known as the Pterodactyl - actually.
Here is a picture of Alasdhair Willis that I took. His comment was actually pretty interesting for a design person (he's got a furniture design company). After  I took it he said, ‘erase it because I’m much too close to the lens’. But I kind of like it. He does actually look very healthy in the flesh, like he spends his life outdoors planting trees.


Anyway, the point is that you might as well be at an accountant’s party as a product designer’s party. I was drinking some rhubarb gin martini  but the high point was the pink Champagne and sushi I had before hand with my friend Gen from Veuve Cliquot and her boss. I was telling them about my summer in Sitges and the subject of Bears on the beach came up and they had no idea what a ‘Bear’ was. Weird, no? I have to say, I was late in coming to the Bear concept myself –some lezza told me when I had a temporary job at Rapido TV about 10 years ago.  I said to Gen and the Veuve Cliquot boss that it’s clever of gay men to come up with a flattering term for someone who is fat old and hairy. Women who are fat, old and hairy just get depressed and think nobody will ever fancy them. But then the boss said that ‘cougars’ is now a new term to describe funky older women like Madonna, so maybe change is afoot. Oh, the other fun thing about the V &A do was bumping into the Guardian interiors columnist Caroline Roux. I haven’t seen her for years. The last time was when Biche had just come out and she came up to me in a club, took the bit of chewing gum out of her mouth and said, here, put this in your mouth and chew it- I know you like that sort of thing because I’ve read Biche’. I think I might well have taken the gum in an attempt to try and  live up to my reputation. I asked her how journalism was going and she said fine, although mostly she was doing ‘consultancy’ and indeed, I keep hearing this from friends of my age. Everyone is a consultant or a ‘brand ambassador’ (heaven forefend that they use the word ‘PR’). The thing with ‘Brand Ambassadors’ is that you normally have to drag up and wear high heels all the time, which I’m not prepared to do. I bumped into my friend Simon Gauge at the V &A who runs www.me-me-me.tv. He said that the Burberry party on Tuesday night wasn’t that great even though lots of famous people were there, because the music was so loud you couldn’t hear what anyone was saying. So I felt not too bad about not even knowing there was going to be a big Burberry party.
My favourite memory of the week is of bumping in to Pam Hogg outside the Paul Smith show in Millbank . She was very pissed and was trying to get a bus to her boyfriend’s house on the Southbank. She said that her memory of her recent fashion show was of ranting and raging at everyone. ‘I didn’t have enough shoes and this one bloody model wouldn’t take her shoes off and give them to Liberty Ross. She was going, “But they fit me perfectly.” And I’m going, “But they fit bloody Liberty Ross too and she’s just  flown in from New Fucking York to do the show for me!”’

Good things to look forward to this weekend:

1. The Lindt Mousse Au Chocolat chocolate bar from the Harper’s Bazaar goody bag. (There was also Chloe perfume and Clarins Creme Jeunesse des Pieds but I swapped them this morning for a free treatment with my physio)
2. Barry Manilow on Desert Island Disks on Sunday
3. Sue Webster and Nick Cave’s birthday party on Sunday night in Soho even though, in an ideal world, I’d rather stay in and eat aother Lindt Mousse Au Chocolat bar.

Do you think Lindt would have me as their Brand Ambassador…???

So, I’m still recovering from my experience on BBC 5 Live’s Richard Bacon show last Thursday (available to listen to for four more days on http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007lb08)  Supposedly, it was to debate the issue ‘We’re all bisexual- yes or no’. I should have had alarm bells ringing when the producer called beforehand to ask me ‘what percentage’ of people I thought were bisexual. I told his I didn’t go for such a simplistic line and that I was more into Dr Kinsey’s famous Kinsey Scale, invented in the 1940s with 0 being ‘exclusively heterosexual’ and 6 being ‘exclusively homosexual’.
‘Yes but what percentage of people would you say are bisexual!’ the producer’s hysterical Northern Irish toned screeched down the line as if he hadn’t heard what I’d just said.
I should have told him then to bog off and go get a job with The Sun but the appearance fee was £75.00 and seeing as I haven’t paid anything into my bank since May I thought I’d better do it. This, by the way, illustrates the funny old rocky terrain in the life of a writer. Two years ago I was complaining about having to report on Karl Lagerfeld’s party at Nobu for Harper’s Bazaar for £750.00. It was a cushy gig I had going for a whole year- I’d sit in Sitges writing my novel and then once a month I’d call up Frances, the editor’s secretary who used to be sent off to do the party reporting and I’d ask her something like, ‘So Frances, I’m assuming it was the usual dullness. Did Mickey Rourke say anything good?’ Then I’d write the party up as if I’d been to it (take it from me: once you’ve been to one party you’ve been to them all.)
Anyway, that journo gig, like all good journo gigs, came to an end and now here I was with the choice of A) going on the dole (they pay £60 a week AND your rent and my musician friend, Belle, says that once you get over the psychological thing it’s fine. And Britain is so namby pamby that you don’t even have to get a job).
B) going on some lame BBC radio call-in show that starts at midnight and anyone knows that most blokes who call up late-night radio shows about bisexuality are just after seedy lesbo info. 
But still, I went for B because I thought I might be able to contact that elusive 13-year old girl in the middle of Wales who is worrying that she doesn’t find boys attractive (bisexuality is a bollocks subject to talk about because all anyone is interested in is the pussy-munching side of the concept) and she might be comforted to hear that she’s not a freak. And I also did it because it’s always a big ego trip to be on national radio. 
So there you go. I was really asking for it. It turned out to be even worse than I’d expected. The presenter, Richard Bacon was apparently too full of his suburban pretty-boy looks to even greet me as I entered the studio which also contained a ‘bubbly’ female vicar, a sour-faced, lank-haired blonde – Richard’s side-kick who was obviously fiercely ambitious (but why would people be ambitious in radio? Do they hope one day to read news about Swine Flu to 1 million listeners, as opposed to 20- as appeared to be the audience of this show?) Then there were 2 other bisexual experts down the lines. When I arrived at the BBC studios in Shepherd’s Bush, the Northern Irish producer bloke said there’d been a mix up with the taxis and so the other guests hadn’t been able to make it (number two alarm bell which should have gone off…). One of the down-the-phone bisexual experts was some worthy type from the Bisexual League or something who kept talking about help lines you could contact. He sounded like a right Walter The Softee. I thought maybe he was a gay bisexual ie a fag who’s teamed up with a chick just because he wants to have babies. The other speaker was some chick who reckoned everyone was bisexual – even though she herself had never had a lesbian relationship. This, I said to Bacon, was like those T-Total restaurant critics. Ie you can’t do the job properly unless you go the whole way…
At one point I did manage to get in the fact that the first time I thought I might not be exclusively lesbian was the night I went to the Way Out club in east London and saw a cute guy in a red dress with massive cleavage and I thought, ‘How sexy – a man with tits and a dick’. Suburban Richard Bacon looked like his eyes were about to pop out of his head and just for the benefit of the Northern Irish man who’d said as he led me to the studio, ‘no swearing, now’, I added again, ‘Yeah, a man with tits and a dick, very sexy’. Bacon then regained his senses and started to sound angry whereupon I sounded even angrier and said, the show was lame because how come they got shocked by sexuality stuff when nobody got shocked by that war drivel they’re always going on about on the radio, TV and in every paper you read.
What a bunch of cowardly, mortgage-paying media types they were, I thought as I got the train down the Essex this weekend to go visit my mother for her 70th birthday. But more horrible hypocrisy and antediluvian gender politics were in store for me last night when we watched Strictly Come Dancing. I have only ever watched clips of this show before but as I watched the parade of glittering male and female dancers last night, it became clear that the biggest crime (from the judges’ point of view- especially that old bloke called Len) was for women not to be ‘feminine’ and the biggest crime for men was not to be ‘masculine’ - even though most of the male dancers on this show are big batty boys and how must it feel to have to swallow that kind of shit all the time? Not that I want to stick up too much for the gayboys- at least there were 2 of them on the panel. Naturally,  no woman on the show was over 30 whereas two of the main men on the show were 60 and 70 plus.
Sometimes I wish I didn’t notice things like this. That I could think something like, ‘oh well, it’s only a TV show.’ Actually, I've noticed people are saying bland things like this more and more- especially my formerly political friends from Cambridge who have now got kids and proper jobs and are too knackered to be angry any more.
On a plus point, my mum’s 70th birthday was really cute. It was a surprise visit to Essex that I made. I hid behind a table and then popped up when my mum came into the house and she cried and I cried and we hugged each other and I felt that intense closeness that I haven't felt since I was a child and I felt hugely lucky that we were both around to do this. So it was worth doing the crummy Richard Bacon show to get the train fare to come. That’s the thing I’ve learned about life. People like my mum and Dad will watch Strictly Come Dancing and take in all that horrific gender politics and yet they’re still nice people. Even people like Bernard Manning, I still have good memories of ie the day he came into my Dad’s fish and chip shop on my 12th birthday for double cod, chips and peas and left me and 87 pence tip. When I was at Cambridge as an undergraduate and i told someone this story, they frowned as if I shouldn’t dare mention such an occurrence- but on some levels I got on well with Bernard Manning. I mean, if you were falling into a burning chip fryer, he’d definitely try and pull you out, even though you wouldn’t necessarily want to get stuck with him at home of a Saturday night. (This same Cambridge person also told me off once for waving at Shirley Williams  when she was doing the rounds on an open-top bus when the – what were they called? The Social Democrat party? Late 80s…Well, those ones- when they’d just been formed.  I waved because I thought she looked lonely up there and none of that miserable Socialist Worker’s Party lot was waving at her at all).  
I thought the Socialist Workers Party lot were lame. They were the ones who blocked Prince Edward’s way when he was trying to get into the halls of residence on his first day at my college- Jesus - and had placards saying things like ‘Down with Prince Edward.’ Lame. I ended up having a room above his in the modern block – North Court- which was so badly designed that if you went onto the balcony you could see the people in the rooms below you having showers. That’s when I first realised he was seriously balding, poor bloke, and he was only in his early 20s. Naturally, I couldn’t  tell anyone that I felt sorry for him.

Here’s a pic of ma in the upper gallery at a 15th century hotel in Lavenham in Suffolk called The Swan.

We had a cream tea here at The Swan which was good but why oh why do hotels skimp on things like jam when it’s not that expensive to give the punters a bit more. Ma said it was the best birthday she ever had. Her favourite birthday cake as a kid in the 1940s was when her mother used to divide the mixture into 3 bowls and then add colouring to each bowl and then you’d mix it all together for a marble effect cake. There’s also some game where her mother made a tower of flour with a fruit pastel on top and each kid had to take a spoonful of four  away from the tower until the pastel fell off and then kid who did that had to pick it up with their mouth…
Sounds like a good game for London fashion week which starts tonight although, ha, ha,  they probably wouldn’t use flour…

So, I woke up yesterday on a white settee in a 1920s folly at the bottom of a garden where Stephen Webster had his 50th birthday party. In Wikipedia, this big stone shed is described as a 'magnificent bathing pavillion' and it was built by Edwin Lutyens in the 19th century, although the main house, Tyringham Hall is from the late 18th century and was built by Sir John Soane- the guy who also has a house in Lincoln's Inn Fields which everyone raves about but which has always struck me as a cluttered old place. Soane needs to chuck out some of his Grand Tour curios.
Meanwhile, I was sleeping in the folly at the bottom of the Tyringham garden because unlike the other guests such as Mickey Rourke, David Walliams and Mick Jones from The Clash  who'd been invited to stay in bedrooms of the Hall itself, I'd been invited strictly for the party.  Sue Webster, as in 'Tim 'n' Sue' the artists from the East End, had told me earlier on in the evening that I should crash in the folly (she referred to it as 'the games room' rather than getting a taxi to Milton Keynes for the £43 a night Holiday Inn experience and indeed, after a night of posh fish fingers on toast, Champagne and Cointreau cocktails, vodka cocktails and a lot of Nancy del Olio on the dance floor- she out-moved us all in her gold Bacofoil dress and stompy black platform stilettos- I was to sneak off to this big Brideshead Revisisted bingo hall in the early hours.
The experience  reminded me of stowing away for the night in the laundry room at Euro Disney when Euro Disney opened in Paris in 1992. At that time, I was doing a freelance piece for a newspaper not considered important enough to put its journo up in one of the hotels after the (fantastically decadent, surprisingly enough) opening party (I don't think they've ever had so much booze, or indeed any booze at Eurodisney since). My friend Adam, who was with me at the time, said we should stay in the laundry room for the night rather than trying to get back to Paris. We chose the laundry room of the New England Hotel- that's one of the more grand standing hotels - there are five of them in total, I seem to remember. We'd been hanging out there most of the night as they had barrel loads of oysters and prawns and Champagne although the cheaper hotel- is it the Santa Fe one- with cowboy and Indian theme? My brain grows misty after all these years- the cheaper hotels were keeping up a good show with lots of roasted meat and chilli concoctions with beer and tequila for refreshments. Anyway, we thought the New England hotel would have a better laundry room and nobody discovered us all night.  In the morning, we crept down the stairs only to bump into a woman I knew vaguely from People magazine (a very important magazine). She was called Cathy and was one of those fun alcoholics. She invited us to have breakfast with her on her table in the hotel which I will always remember as an act of extreme kindness (and coolness, as most journos are a bunch of paranoid, bitter, self-obsessed people who don't always look out for other people).

If oysters, a laundry room and Alky Cathy from People magazine are my lasting memories of the opening of Eurodisney, then posh fish fingers, Nancy Dell'Olio and cheap sausages are my memory of Stephen Webster's 50th birthday party. Oh, and also Mick Jones of the Clash walking into the breakfast room early on Sunday morning, brandishing a pack of Rizzlas between two fingers and exclaiming 'Peace in our time!' like Neville Chamberlain parading his supposed peace letter from Hitler before proceeding to skin up (Mick, not Neville) over a plate of the aforementionned cheap pork sausages.
I always prefer the morning after the party to the party itself. Back in my E days in Brixton, I was always secretly glad to leave Kinky Gerlinky and go back to my friend's flat in Brixton for Marmite on toast and tea (and to look at my griend's bobbly green jumble sale jumper and say things like,  'Wow, that jumper's so amaaaazing...it's a really beautiful, beautiful thing...').

Here's a pic of the folly taken from the white settee at about 8.30 the next morning:


And here is my favourite pic of the summer. As a few of my more faithful readers might have noticed, I've been bunking off writing this blog thing for a few weeks months?). I do intend to write up my summer holiday adventures at some point ( on the Riviera, lovies. Don't you love that 'R' word?) but for the moment, here is a sneak preview: the freshest Rascasse (the Holy Grail of the Bouillabaisse experience) I have ever seen in my life. Captured on the Vieux Port in Marseilles. There's a film I made of this on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJq7g0eOsXU

Well, thanks to my Friend From The North (he knows who he is) for telling me to carry on with my blog. I have taken a bit of time out of late, A) because I’ve been bumming around in Spain after the drama of my book launch- well, doing a bit of photography too, actually- check out what the sun can do to a plate of bread and squashed tomatoes:


I know, muy bonito, no? (Pan con tomate, the Catalans call it like it’s some form of flash souffle but then the Catalans were never big on modesty). The B reason I’ve not been writing is that I haven’t really been hanging out with any famous people of late and I figured nobody would be interested in my regular ever-so-humble life. But then, C) I was invited to a polo match on Sunday by my friend Genevieve from Veuve Clicquot- one of my old pals from my Harper’s Bazaar days. I acquired a polo saddle from another of my PR mates a few years back (she was organising a bash at a huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ shop called Swaine, Adeney, Brigg in St James’s and not enough celebs turned up so she gave me the voucher- for £1000- originally meant for Bryan Ferry’s son). 
If you are ever looking for a good crop or if you just want to get a big whiff of horsy leather then you should check this shop out.  They do nice luggage but I decided to spend my £1000 on one of the saddles- it was pretty small and a beautiful piece of workmanship. I’ve had it on a barrel in my front room for the past two years- I sit on it when the horsy urge overcomes me but when I got Genevieve’s invitation, I was gagging for the real thing.
Funnily enough, I don’t remember much about the polo match itself because we arrived at midday and left at 6pm and we didn’t stop drinking champagne once. Pink stuff, yellow stuff, gold stuff, sweet stuff. I was aware that we were at a place in Sussex called Cowdray Park and that the match was between a team from Dubai and another lot from Argentina called Loro Piana (which sounds like it might have something to do with Cilla Black and music but is, in fact, a very expensive Italian fashion label).
I wandered about in the VIP enclosure, tucking into crayfish canapes in  gold goblets served with a fork with a mother-of-pearl handle (a tricky manoeuvre when you’ve got a flute of Champagne in the other hand). I kept thinking about the Sunday Times article on Dubai I’d just read on the drive up in the  ‘courtesy coach’ from London. About how you get stoned there and thrown into prison if you snog someone you’re not married to or if you snog someone you are married to in public. And obviously there’s not a lot of room there for big lezza nights out either. Yet now, here we were in the VIP enclosure at this big old polo gathering about to watch Dubai play – and everyone seemed very nice. That’s the thing when you’re in these circles - sitting next to Naomi Harris from Pirates of the Caribbean, swigging back Veuve Clicquot and eating peach foam sorbet in a spun sugar cage on a bed of champagne jelly with an almond langue du chat base - the whole stoning and human rights thing goes clean out of your head.

Here’s the peach foam thing- before you cracked the cage open:


And after:



Mmmm, maybe you needed to be there... Plus, I was too drunk to remember to bring my camera to the table and had to make do with my rubbishy Nokia phone.

Luckily, I was sitting next to a very nice guy called Nick from Mission PR (whose boss looks like a reincarnated Kenneth Williams) who was chatting about how he’d had a discussion the previous night with a couple of lezza friends who were moaning on about how there are a bazillion gayboy bars and STILL- IN TWO THOUSAND AND BLOODY NINE- only ONE lesbian bar in central London. That is the conversation I'm always having with gay boys too- the ones lamenting about how, ‘Oh, but you lesbians are so lucky because you can have relationships but we gayboys can’t.’ I always try to keep calm as I inform them that if you can have loads of sex (as they can) then you can also decide to have a relationship with one of your shags and the only reason that lezzas pack up and move in with another chick on the second date is that they fear it might be another 5 years before they actually meet another dyke.
As it happens I’d had lunch with another gayboy PR earlier in the week in Nobu Berkley Square (the flash sushi restaurant owned by Robert De Niro). He’d agreed with me on the gayboys having loads and loads of cake and not eating any of it front. ‘On any Saturday night in Vauxhall alone,’ he said, ‘there’s one club with 2000 Spanish men dancing with their tops off, next to a club with 3000 Italian men dancing with their tops off and then you’ve got The Hoist and the…’ In short, as Mr Darcy might have said, it is a truth universally acknowledged that it's going to be difficult to settle down into a relationship when you’ve got all that cock around.
My PR friend then informed me how the new club drug is a thing called Five Star General which is a mix of all the top recreational drugs that ever existed: coke and speed and heroin and crystal meth and K. As I was reflecting how Five Star General seems a kind of Long Island Iced Tea of the drugs world (you’ll remember that Long Island Iced tea is supposed to be the strongest cocktail in the world- all the white spirits mixed together - tequila, rum, gin, vodka and triple sec), I noticed an addendum at the bottom of the Nobu menu saying that blue fin tuna is an endangered species now. You expected it to then say that they’d decided not to serve it- I’d read that week that by 2040 there won’t be any more fish left in the world- but it just said something to the effect that it was a matter for your own conscience if you ordered tuna or not. With the Five Star General conversation going on, it seemed churlish not to order the endangered tuna. Kids in 30 years time might never know what fish tastes like but then most people have never tasted peach foam sorbet in a sugar cage and, believe me, you’re not missing anything.
Meanwhile, back at the Cowdray Park polo,  my tete a tete with Nick was brought to a halt when one of the Veuve Clicquot people stood up to announce that the polo match was about to start and to give us a short lesson in how polo is played- lots of refs to ‘chukkas’ although by now we were on to the Veuve Clicquot vintage demi-sec (the sweet stuff) so I’m afraid I can’t remember any of the rules. I do remember though, that there were lots of titter-y references to men in tight white jodhpurs that ‘the ladies will certainly enjoy!’ and Nick and I both raised out eyes to the heavens and thanked our lucky stars for our superior gender politics. Maybe we hoped that in some way this would make up for the fact that some adulterous Human Resources manageress from Entwistle on her summer hols to Saudia Arabia was at that moment being carted off to some grim prison in downtown Dubai…
Re celebs, as I said, there was Naomi Harris who played the voodoo witch in Pirates of The Caribbean. Here she is, sitting at our table in the blue dress.


(Ben Grimes the model was supposed to have come but couldn’t make it). You will see the funny orange cardboard lampshades behind Naomi. These were made by a famous designer called Tom Dixon who was also there:


Tom is not a fashion designer but what they call a ‘product designer’. Usually these people are more boring than accountants (as opposed to fashion designers who are always very entertaining) but Tom was once in a 1980s British funk band called Funkapolitan and he has a gold tooth so the Wallpaper lot think he’s cool. I also saw  Donna Air, who used to be married to Damian Aspinall who is referred to in the papers as ‘multi-millionaire socialite Damian Aspinall’. In the milieu, he is better known for being the son of John Aspinall, a crazed, self-important gambling magnate who had himself crowned a Zulu warrior king in Africa and who ran a zoo in England with a trendy policy that you could go in and stroke the tigers in the cages if you wanted to. My friend, India-Jane Birley’s brother got his face eaten off when he was 11 during a day trip to this afore-mentioned trendy zoo.
Anyway, Donna Air who I think used to be a TV presenter, looked much happier and less anorexic without old Damian around. I’m not convinced he’s that much  into the ladies anyway. I was once on a fashion shoot with Donna and Damian and Patrick Cox. At one point, Damian took the tissue paper out of the toes of some Cox shoes, stuffed it up his jumper and started saying to Patrick: “Look! This is what girl’s do, isn’t it- rub tits!” He then put the paper down his crotch and told Patrick to rub up against him.  Patrick thought about it and then said, “No I’m not going to. You’ll like it too much.” I thought that was cool of the Canadian famous for his Wannabe loafers that were big in the 1980s. Maybe the Interesting product designer, Tom Dixon had a pair.  Maybe Patrick was too interesting for his own good though because, as my Nobu PR friend informed me, Patrick Cox went bust earlier this year. David Guest, Elton’s husband, is now supporting him while Tom Dixon is making bucks from orange cardboard lamps for champagne companies.
Isaac Ferry was also there- remember, the one who didn’t turn up to the saddle party at Swaine, Adeney, Brigg? I went up to him and said hello. We’ve met a few times, after all - the first time notably on a trip four years ago to Bangkok with Detmar Blow where Isaac- the second of Bryan Ferry’s four sons- told a cute story about how he’d once found 22 lady birds on his lamp in his room at Eton. Only when I said hello to him on Sunday, he claimed not to know me and in fact, he claimed not even to be Isaac Ferry. ‘Yeah, I’m afraid I’m not him,’ he announced. ‘I hear he’s inside in a black jumper’. The give-away was that Isaac said this in the same quiet gentle voice that he’d used to tell the ladybird story  in Bangkok. It was sad really but I wasn;t too sad because at least I'd once got a free polo saddle becasue he (really) hadn't been at another party. London life’s obviously hardened him. Or maybe the fact that his dad (63) is now dating one of his ex-girlfriends, 27-year-old Amanda, another of my party PR friends, is what has hardened him.  Not that I want to encourage anyone to read the Daily Mail, but you can get the lowdown on the story here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1200776/Heres-youre-missing-son-Bryan-Ferry-63-frolics-sons-ex-girlfriend-27.html
Interestingly, Bryan’s ex-wife, is now married to the guy, Robin, whose face was ripped open by the tiger at Aspinall’s zoo. Small world, huh? Like I say, ‘High Society’ has always reminded me of the Lesbian Underworld.

Oh, and when we got home, look what  Jake and I found in our pockets:


It was that naughty Champagne what made us do it.

Most people need a hot shot agent or millions of book sales to get themselves a slot at the prestigious Hay Literary Festival. I have neither, but what I do have is a penchant for hustling. Remember that night  back in March - the Harper’s Bazaar party where Viv Westwood said that A Partial Indulgence reminded her of vomit (see my first blog entry)? Well, that night  I got talking to burlesque superstar Immodesty Blaize about Hay and at one point, she said, ‘We should do something together.’

Naturally, I followed this suggestion up and so it was that I found myself last Saturday night with a walkie talkie box strapped to my G-string and one of those Madonna microphones strapped around my ears,  about to enter stage left onto a massive stage with a 1000-strong audience. Immodesty was doing her rocking horse routine and then she had to leave the stage to take off her 18-inch corset during which time Julian Clary and I were supposed to ‘banter’ up there in front of all the punters. Here is a pic of me and Julian half an hour earlier at dinner.


Julian has just turned 50 ('too old for Alcopops, too young for Midsummer Murders') and he’d just been given a packet of cheesy balls by one of the old ladies who came to buy his new novel, Devil In Disguise, which he’d just done a talk about. It’s a good book – funny and engaging- almost as good as his first one, Murder Most Fab, and I’d recommend them both… I was going to say ‘as beach reads’ which is what everyone says about a certain light type of book.  This annoys me as I always think, Why shouldn’t you read something a little darker on a beach- something about freaked-out aristos and meditations on the after-life? I’m referring to A Partial Indulgence, in case all you dear readers out there still haven’t shelled out for a copy.

Meanwhile, half an hour later everyone was all of a kafuffle back stage at the Guardian tent. Julian was outside puffing on a series of fags and I was trying to work out how on earth I was going to be able to link my gothic ‘literary’ novel with Immodesty Blaize’s Tease which, she unashamedly declares is a ‘bonk buster.’

Here’s Immodesty earlier that day posing with her Independent Magazine cover and her novel, Tease. It was cute. I told her that things don’t get much better than this in publishing and that your first novel is always your most exciting time.


Meanwhile, back in the back stage area, a wall of bright red feathers suddenly arrived and it was Immodesty herself- all 9 foot of her including the plumed head dress. She had a red sparkly whip, the 18-inch corset which did look really uncomfortable and she kept saying ‘I feel as if I’m missing something’ followed by, ‘pass me my glass of Champagne’ which I thought was a good bit. In this sanitized world ( at least, front of house, they would have us believe that it is sanitized) nobody is supposed to slug back mouthfuls of champagne to give them Dutch courage before a big performance- models do it all the time too- and supposedly nobody smokes fags any more. But sometimes you NEED fags and you NEED booze and yes, maybe they are bad for you but nobody ever said that show biz was good for your heart.
As I watched Immodesty parade onto the stage with her two showgirl side kicks, I wished I’d brought my glass of warm white wine with me from the dining tent but soon the music sprung up (Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet mixed with some deep base house music) and I peeped out from the curtains at her as I simultaneously bopped along with nerves. I mean, I felt like I was at Sunday Night at the London Palladium ie it was all well out of my league. The last time I’d been in front of an audience even half this size was back at my convent school play and I only had to play Herod then in a non-speaking, non-moving tableau vivante production (as the nuns pretentiously referred to it).

 In fact, I felt absolutely terrified and absolutely excited at the same time which, funnily enough is an emotion I often try to describe in my novels. Meanwhile,  Immodesty suddenly came off to thunderous applause, and Julian Clary went on and started doing his MC bit- about how he’s a famous homosexual in that dead pan way of his – which I like. He told the audience that he was now going to be having a chat with me about my novel (that was a good bit, to hear the very famous Julian Clary, who I was a massive fan of back when I was a frustrated teenager,  announce ‘A PARTIAL INDULGENCE by Stephanie Theobald’).

But then it was kind of weird. I walked up the wings and onto the stage and everyone clapped and then we sat down like on Wogan or something and started to talk about Burlesque- his sister had been a Tiller Girl in Madrid when he was a teenager and he’d gone over to see her and apparently fallen in love with the idea. And then I started to say how I’d got into the stripper girl thing from the more seedy angle ie lesbian strippers in Soho- and the fact was, I’m not sure the audience were ready for that- I seemed to hear a resounding silence as I spoke anyway. Julian proceeded to make a few jokes about ‘…um…how long is it going to take Immodesty to change out of her corset…and um…’ But still Immodesty didn’t return and so Julian  ummed a bit more until it struck me that he was sort of corpsing- as they say in the show biz world. I thought I’d better try and get the conversation going so I brought up the fact of him having gone to a Catholic Benedictine school- which he’d told me over dinner. I said maybe he could write about that in his next novel and then I said that I went to a convent school - which is true- and that at this convent school, the nuns used to take the door knobs off the doors- which is not true (although this did happen at my Paris flat mate- Caroline’s convent school).  I couldn’t quite believe I’d said this, even as I was saying it, although from sniggers in the audience, the punters seemed to know what I was talking about. When I think about it now, maybe Julian wasn’t corpsing – maybe it was just a ‘dramatic pause’ like you hear about in the theatre. Luckily, Immodesty then came on and we proceeded to chat about our respective novels. At one point, Immodesty brought up the idea of ‘body horror’ which occurs in my novel and she said she liked the whole ‘blood’ thing in my book and said something like how ‘shit, blood, spunk, piss’ are all part of life. I had a vision of her as a crazy Catherine wheel going off and spluttering out ‘shit, blood, spunk and piss!’.
It’s funny that a lot of A Partial Indulgence is about death because sitting on that spot-lit stage in a very large, dark room in front of hundreds of people you couldn’t see felt a bit like an out-of-body experience.

Here is me signing books after the event.


Actually, that bloke isn’t a punter, he’s one of the Hay book shop staff pretending to buy a book. And that, dear readers, is one of the realities of being a ‘literary’ novelist- you don’t get masses of teenaged fans clamoring to buy your book and ask you about your moves on your rocking horse. Still, Immodesty rocks as far as I am concerned. She is hot and brainy and she invited me to stay in her pad in the Dordogne this summer to eat foie gras and swim in her pool so, as they say, every cloud has a silver lining.

Meanwhile, this time last week I’d been having a big gay weekend in Blackpool with my Scouse mates and I have to say, I did enjoy that more than Hay (although Hay is good because you get to see a lot of lambs gambling or rather, gamboling, and also there are lots of horses. Here is one who is enjoying a stick of rock (stolen) from a Blackpool kiosk.


And here are a couple of pics of views outside my bedroom window. One was taken from my Hay bedroom and one was taken from my Blackpool bedroom. See if you can guess which is which: