Robert Fripp's Diary

Here in Room at The

The eclair which, in authentic English fashion, claims little for itself also, in authentic English fashion, effortlessly manages to live up to its claims. Welcome it is, nonetheless, and is being washed down by a filter coffee obtained at the nearby Tesco. The architecture of this Tesco is an example of how far civilization has travelled since the construction of Peterborough cathedral, just 200 yards away.

This morning my wife went to Nottingham to record three contributions for a television cookery programme, and I took the opportunity to visit two coffee shops (both affecting the Gallic demeanour), two bookshops, and three record shops (Andy's, Virgin, HMV), All three record shops have well-stocked King Crimson sections, and Andy's features recommended albums with high-lighted "bookmarks". Generously, Andy recommends "Red" and "In The Court".

Dillons attracted my book trade: a biography of Osbert Sitwell (an acquaintance who fell out with Beaton) and a biography of Greta Garbo, who was the great love of Beaton's life. (We are not discussing Beaton the Wonder Bun here, but Cecil Beaton the society photographer). This Beaton transformed the marital home of Toyah and myself between 1948 and 1974, when a stroke brought an end to the improvements. He died in our bedroom on January 18th. 1980.

Two books were published on the affair between Garbo and Cecil four years ago, of which the definitive version - "Loving Garbo" - is by Hugo Vickers, Beaton's biographer and literary executor. (The other, critical of Beaton, is Diana Souhami's "Greta and Cecil"). Hugo arrived at the house to write the official biography two days before Cecil died and, afterwards, found Garbo's letters to Cecil under the bed. The "Garbo rose" given by Greta years before was framed and on the bedroom wall. Garbo's biography (by Karen Swenson) draws widely on Hugo's "Loving Garbo". I have no interest in Garbo as such, but the book continues to inform the history of our home.

Garbo died in 1990. Stories are still told in the village by Les, our soon-to-be 93 year old gardener (and one of Beaton's), and Mr. Blick our builder, of Garbo's visits to the village. At a time when South Wiltshire villages still belonged to an earlier century, the visit of a Hollywood movie star was mucho news. Her last visit to this house was in 1975, somewhat angered by the publication of their affair in Beaton's diaries (1972-3). She was embarrassed to find Cecil in reduced straits, following his stroke the year before.

The Osbert Sitwell biography is one of a growing number of published biographies of English society characters influential during the 1920s and 1930s. Osbert, and his sister Edith, were famously photographed by Cecil. The eccentric Lord Berners has also recently been biographised and his life is added to my shelves alongside the biography of Stephen Tennant. Tennant was a close acquaintance (personally and geographically) of Beaton, and lived over the valley (in the manor next door to Sting & Trudy's pile). Since almost every leading figure of the 1920s & 1930s was photographed by Beaton, his portraits adorn biography bookjackets of this century's leading figures.

Beaton, Sitwell, Berners and Tennant were all homosexual, when Bright Young Things was a term was used as shorthand for those in the know. Noel Coward and Oliver Messel were other culturally influential gay men; all spent the larger part of their lives threatened by the reverberations of Oscar Wilde's persecution / prosecution.

"On Queer Street" by Hugh David sits on a nearby shelf: a recent English social history of homosexuality since the Establishment went for Wilde in the 1890s. (I read David's "The Fitzrovians" several years ago).

These volumes reflect my interest in the immediate history of our home, and my wider interest in social history. Useful to acquire an understanding of how we are where we are. My sense as a younger man that somehow England (or, rather, one particular notion of England) never recovered from The Great War was confirmed by the historian Hugh Cecil, one of Lord David Cecil's three children. (We met in 1986 after the purchase of Red Lion House in Cranborne from Lord David's executors).

I am not a homophobe and I don't emotionally understand the persecution of homosexuals (or anyone else, for that matter. The shock of discovering the Nazi concentration camps, as an 11 year old Winburnian, has never left me). A recent book on gay references in rock songs referred to the line "health food faggot" from The Great Deceiver. At the DGM Playback for "The Night Watch" (London 1997) I asked Richard Palmer-James, the lyricist for that and several other Crimson songs of the 1972-74 period, what he had meant. Richard had no gay reference in mind: his notion of "faggot" was the health food version of a meatball. The insulting gay connotation only occurred to him later.

And moving associatively along: I knew Gerald Wilde, one of Oscar's grandsons, at Sherborne House during my time there (October 1975 - July 1976). Gerald was a painter of genius, a drinking chum of Brendan Behan among others, and quite mad. Gerald lived at the back of the House in a studio / garage building, where he painted. As students walked by his studio on their way to the village Post Office & Shop, Gerald would suddenly appear and importune them to buy liquor for him at the store. He painted / depicted the forms and movement of energies, and several of Gerald's works were displayed around Sherborne House, and reproductions used on jackets of Mr. Bennett's books of the period.

A third book acquisition from Dillon's: Roger Scruton's "Modern Philosophy" (1995). Last week I came across a quote by Edward Matchett: "To use a philosophy rather than a discipline is the height of folly...".