R: “How are you feeling?” Me: “A bit ropey”. We had this exchange over the breakfast table for the last two mornings. I’d had two lunches.
It’s why you read this website – taking vicarious pleasure in my hangovers. Before I forget I must digress. I have resumed two activities I thought I’d forsaken. Go on, guess: nose picking and flicking, biting finger nails, reading Dornford Yates? Yes, guilty on all charges but I have started sending in entries to The Spectator crossword competition (thrice) and writing to the FT (twice).
At both lunches something special happened. Friday was a big, three hundred of us, fund raiser for the Conservatives at the Intercontinental Hotel. A vivacious and lovely Chinese lady bounced up to me familiarly. Somehow I remembered I’d sat beside her in 2019 at a similar lunch, at the Savoy. She wanted and got a selfie with me. My guess is that like a desperate gambler at a roulette table she wanted to cover as many options as possible, in case I am or might be a name.
When I was a child my mother had a Christmas party for me. Party bags didn’t exist but Father Christmas existed and came to give us all small presents at the end of the party. Excitement surrounded FCs arrival. My mother would pop out onto the landing saying she thought she had heard sleigh bells but it was a false alarm. It was the same at the Intercontinental on Friday. Patrick Evershed said there were too many demonstrators outside the hotel for the Prime Minister to get in; like my mother he’s a tease, or maybe not as I think the PM did use a back entrance, something I’ve heard Michael Gove is doing to protect his privacy.
Boris was talking to the faithful and he socked it to us. More than once I laughed out loud. He is a communicator; none of us wanted to hear Tory policy; after too many bottles of the Intercontinental house wines we wanted a stand-up comic; oh boy, did he deliver.
Yesterday’s lunch was on a more modest scale. I met a friend, he assures me he never reads the blog, so I can say he’s a journalist and a stripper. He takes his clothes off to sit for artists. We had lunch at Sam’s Riverside and this is the second special thing. There were Carlingford Lough (Northern Ireland) oysters on the menu. I had crevettes. To digress my friend said he had never heard of crevettes but he followed up to tell me his French is better than mine. I told the waitress that although the lough spans the the border I think the oysters are harvested in the republic. I also mentioned I was taught to waterski in the lough. She gave me a v delicious CL (NI?) oyster gratis. Unusual to get a freebie unless you are a critic. After lunch we saw My Beautiful Launderette; a better and more complex film I remember from the 1980s.
Serendipitously my friend told me he knows the launderette and it’s about to be destroyed by developers. More interestingly, there’s a sculpture exhibition at Riverside Studios and he is the model for the nude sculptures; anyway, another day, another film.