I usually try to get to the Soho Fete each year. Held in the churchyard of the wartime bombed St. Anne’s, on Wardour Street, it remains a truly local affair, with the bar run by the French pub and locals manning the stalls. There is a Soho waiters’ race that starts and ends outside the French, when waiters carrying a tray with a bottle of champagne, a glass and an ashtray, run up Dean Street, round Soho Square, back down Greek Street and across Romilly Street to the finish line; this year won by the Ham Yard Hotel. The London Fire Brigade won the tug-of-war against the local police and the London pearly kings and queens were out in their finery All the usual attractions were there including the Human Fruit Machine and the snail race, a Rocky Horror show singalong, the drag queen finale and a few choruses of ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ and ‘Cock Linnet’. How London can you get? Here’s the Fire Brigade getting their award and some of the alternate London royalty showing community support. 

My son Theo was there with Mina. I went with Lucy but soon ran into Hannah. I love being with them both and when the fete ended we went on to The White Horse on Newburgh Street, next to Carnaby Street, where The Fallen Heroes, friends of Lucy’s, were playing. The three of us finally got home where I had fortunately prepped a meal that I somehow managed to cook. It was a real Soho day in brilliant sunshine, though it took me a day to get over it.

The US has left UNESCO yet again, following their withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords and WHO. It’s really only their money that will be missed as the US has very little in the way of culture, given the size of its population; the Paris Climate Accords are inimical to the oil business so American compliance with any attempts to cut back on oil production were always likely to fail, and of course, with regard to WHO, the US is the only developed country in the world to not have a national health system. In other words, reactionary through and through, and destined to get worse as their position in the world becomes less and less significant. In fact, to use one of Trump’s favourite phrases, a real ‘shithole country’. 

On a lighter note. Camila and I went to see the David Hockney show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. All the great pictures were there: A Bigger Splash; Peter Schlesinger looking petulantly into a swimming pool and waiting expectantly on a bed; ‘Mr & Mrs Clark and Percy’,; the giant landscapes and the wonderful Royal College work from the early sixties which I have always liked. I sent Raymond Foye a pic of his portrait with Henry Geldzahler to show that we thought of him while viewing the picture. Sadly the Wayne Sleep-George Lawson double portrait wasn’t there, it would have been a nice tribute to George who died not that long ago. 

We were there largely to see Hockney’s new William Blake picture as Camila is a Blake scholar, on the board of the William Blake Society and the Blake Cottage Trust, and we were en route to the Pyrenees to spend a week working together on an anthology of Allen Ginsberg’s poems about the auditory vision of William Blake back in 1948 that so very much influenced his life and poetry.

The next day we went to the Museum d’Orsay. I sought out the Suzanne Valadon pictures, as I have been studying her work recently. The collection of Impressionists there is astonishing, I would love to live next door and see the pictures all the time. There was a Courbet there that caught Camila’s eye and a Renoir that matched her hat. I naturally did a bit of mansplaining having been several times to the Monet in London show recently at the Courtauld.

Paris would not be Paris without a few nice drinks. We were at Hotel La Louisiane, so the Palette was just up the street where William Burroughs used to score for heroin and boys – how things have changed! The pina colada pic was taken at the Rhumerie, the old rock ‘n’ roll haunt from when I was a rock critic in the seventies. All the visiting bands used to hang out there.

Next day we were on our way south.