July 24th - July 30th 2006
Sunday Robert Carrier
Saturday Marylebone
Friday Gilded roof
Thursday Naked trannies
Wednesday Leave to remain
Tuesday Canning Town
Monday As if you mean it
Sunday 30th July
Obituary Watch: Robert Carrier
Born Robert McMahon, an American of Irish and French descent, he adopted the French surname of his grandmother [and] learnt the delights of French cooking by helping a friend who had a restaurant in St Tropez.
He moved to Britain in 1953 where he took a job in public relations, an occupation that provided ample scope for his charm and flamboyance.
On the strength of a memorable dinner party, the editor of Harper's Bazaar offered him a job as food editor. He took it, and soon established himself as a pioneer of modern cookery writing - some said that Carrier took over where Mrs Beeton had left off.
The pleasures which only his friends had previously experienced were shared with a wider clientele when he opened a restaurant in 1966 in Camden Passage, Islington, which had become a chic centre of the London antiques trade.
His "négresse sans chemise" was a decadent chocolate truffle cake that celebrated an unrestrained indulgence, which many Britons, still slowly shedding the habits of austerity, were coming to enjoy.
In 1971 Carrier bought Hintlesham Hall, near Ipswich. Carrier's name and charisma were by now so great that he could weather the occasional lapse of judgment and bear the expense of putting them right.
He invested more than £300,000 to turn Hintlesham into a cookery school. However, the friend whom he had hoped to appoint as the chief instructor was unable to accept the post so Carrier had to give the classes himself.
An ebullient and gregarious showman who enjoyed entertaining, he could also be temperamental. He closed Hintlesham at the end of 1982, just one year after opening his cooking school.
It was said that Carrier's lunch or dinner parties were prepared as though they were theatre - well cast, flatteringly lit and acted with panache. "I entertain several nights a week," he said. "It's my life."
Carrier had a romantic streak. While at Hintlesham he revived the town festival and for a while he owned a theatre in Montmartre.
Carrier did not marry.
Saturday 29th July
Marylebone, Summer 2006
Friday 28th July
When the sun beats down on the city as it has this week, you look as some people going about their business and think: I wouldn't have their job for all the money in the world.
Laying tarmac, for example. Who the hell does that in this heat?
Clearing drains. Working in a Wimpy Bar. Managing a launderette. I don't imagine taxidermy is a walk in the park in this weather either.
No, no, no, you cry. Give me a little light painting and decorating. Or, should that prove too fumey, something yet more delicate. Gilding, for instance. Just the ticket.
I have a friend of a friend who's been busy gilding this week.Gilding, specifically, the weather-vane of St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe.
In situ, on the roof, fifty feet above the busy Blackfriars traffic.
Imagine the heat.
And then imagine the sunlight. Glaring back at you, relentlessly.
On balance, I think I'd rather be laying tarmac.
Thursday 27th July
The delightful Jake Shears - something of a hero here at Blogadoon ever since I was introduced to him in Vauxhall two years ago (and babbled that one day the Scissor Sisters would be a great stadium band, em) - has been telling The Sun, as you do, how the end of the band's tour left him so depressed that he considered suicide (a revelation that the newspaper headlined, with characteristic empathy "I wanted to Jake it all in").
The "flamboyantly camp" (?) singer goes on to reveal that he's thinking about marrying his (stoically butch?) boyfriend at the Glastonbury festival.
We could have naked trannies jumping out of cakes and stuff. It'd be fun.
Indeed it would. Except for the literal-minded amongst us, perpetually hung up on the question of what, precisely, naked trannies would wear. And how we would know they are trannies...
Wednesday 26th July
James (whom I suspect I have never actually met, itself a curiousity) has been granted 2 years leave to remain in the country, and in Vauxhall specifically. With friends like these who can blame him for wanting to celebrate?
Tuesday 25th July
Canning Town, Summer 2006
Monday 24th July
Though I've read a biography of 18thC actor-manager David Garrick, and do vaguely remember that he co-wrote several plays with George Colman, I don't imagine that I'd ever have gone out of my way to see A Clandestine Marriage had it not turned up on a tv channel near me, conveniently packaged as a movie with a creamy cast of British character actors that includes the inimitable Nigel Hawthorne, Timothy Spall and Tom Hollander.
It's unclear how much of the script comes from the original play, so I'm not sure who to credit for lines like "Dress - as if you mean it!", let alone the advice grotesquely warbled to her niece by Joan Collins: "And you, young lady, should be about your business, not dawdling wanly on your bolster!"
Dawdling wanly on my bolster is all I'm fit for in this weather.
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