Art & Alcohol

I have a back injury which is being treated with pain killers and anti-inflammatories. Tonight I have added a bottle of Australian red wine. Before you start tutting let me say that on top of everything else I have had bad news today.

My friend Max Lake has died. Yes, I know Max was 84 and had lived a very full life but all the more reason to mourn his going. While the rest of us struggle to find ONE career Max had at least three. He was a doctor, a surgeon, further he was Australia's first hand surgeon.

Secondly he established a very successful winery called Lake's Folly and it was from there I drank his good health, retrospectively, this evening. He was an all round sensualist and , the gods know there are few enough of those, who took his evidence from from his nose and taste buds. He would have loved to have smelt me recently. I have had my own perfume made by me and for me. Not, you understand, for the wider commercial market, but just for me. For a perfume can only truly reflect the personality and character of one person and in my case is not for the masses. When a Z-lister holds up their perfume at a launch it is most likely the first time they will have seen it, they will have had no input into its content, they will have no knowledge of smell or the magical interaction of scents or the alchemy of the perfumers skills...they will simply have turned up for the launch in a skimpy frock, learnt the name and a few lines about 'top notes' and 'bottom notes' and pout and mooeh for the camera and the chances are, if the media likes them, they will make a few grand.

But I wanted something for myself...something entirely original...I went to The Cotswold Perfumery at Bourton on Water, one of the very few perfumeries in this country and enrolled on a course which ultimately promised a perfume of one's very own. Setting aside the gorgeousness of the perfumer himself...heck why not admit it?...it would be worth paying the money just to sit in his pristine laboratory fantasising about lab coats and doing filthy things in an immaculate environment and just watching and listening to him with a polite look on one's face and dirty thoughts in one's mind...and I ended up with 'Very Lesley'....a heady mix of geranium and skunk and Bulgarian rose that would, in any case, be far too expensive to sell to the hoi polloi who wouldn't be interested anyway...and which when I wear it has men like Max Lake moving towards me. Max loved food as much as he loved wine. But more than either of these he loved women. Not girls, women. He wrote a book, a copy of which I have, called 'Scents and Sensuality: The Essence of Excitement.' He was a great believer in self-publishing, as am I, long before it became fashionable. His third career, after selling the winery, was as a flavourologist, He was studying the evolution of taste and smell and flavour – all much, and surprisingly, unexplored sciences.

I never met the man but I shall miss him.

So what is the good news about having a bad back? Well I won't have to go to Ascot. People from financial advising companies in coaches thinking they are attending a 'posh' event that by their very presence has become the height of common – though I appreciate the word 'common' is only used by those who are themselves common. My Father said that weddings brought out the worst in women's clothes and that funerals brought out the best. I think that Ascot should pretend it is a funeral.

One of the good things about The Back is that I wear heat pads about my person. This has taken 10 years off my age. By giving me red cheeks – face (I must be careful now I write for The News of the World) – I look like a 50 year old in a permanent state of hot flush. I am volunteering for a trip to the North Pole as I shall simply cover myself in heat pads and complain about the warmth. Some years ago I entered a charity auction to win tea with Joseph Fiennes, the actor, but hundreds of pounds later I found it was Ranulph Fiennes, the explorer. I can only say that I understand why he does so many of his adventures solo. I told you I have never been lucky.

But I am lucky in the suggestions that are sent to me about Bad Backs. These range from the kind and helpful – Red Sea baths and electric shock treatment – to the more worrying 'hang yourself from a tree'. With the last I asked, not unreasonably, if a tangerine and hotel curtain tie-backs were required, like a lib-dem, but was told these were optional extras.

You know that game where you are asked what you would do if you were invisible? Well I would slip into the National Portrait Gallery and steal Maclisse's portrait of Dickens. It is the one where Dickens is still a young man, 28, with his wonderful brown hair, thick and curly. Visitors to his house commented on the mirrors everywhere. Dickens was the Beckham of his day. The most famous face in the world, apart from Queen Victoria, and one of the most vain and marketable. For years it was impossible to sell anything, an umbrella, a pair of gloves, a watch, without the Dickens endorsement. He needed security to walk the streets but was mocked by those who were better educated for his vulgarity and the vulgarity of his lifestyle. He shared with Beckham the obsessive need for everything to be ordered and tidy. Beckham had a rug in Spain that he hoovered to make sure the pile went in one direction like a Wimbledon court. Dickens invented the post-it note so that he could leave little pieces of paper in his children's rooms telling them to tidy this, to put away that...there is nothing new in the world.

I wasn't able to go to the opening of the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. For those who have never been this is a sort of art jumble sale. Or X-factor for finger painting. Untalented W.I. Members enter exhibits (a watercolour of our Cotswold barn by moonlight) alongside untalented Damien Hurst (solid silver figure of St Bartholomew) and predictable Anthony Gormley (something made of wire), and Renzo Piano, the architect much admired by Mr Brain, (two low sandcastles in a plastic box)...in an experience much like shopping in Marks and Spencer's. There may be a piece of gorgeousness there but I can't for the heck of it find it amongst all the junk...every year I go and it leaves me wanting to a) scream and throw paint over it all (an improvement, no doubt) b) go away and paint for myself, nothing little and precious and old-lady-ish but huge and anarchic and mucky c) have enough money to indulge in the pointlessness of art. Because that is what art is. It's no good telling me it's about beauty or skill or education or moving the spirit..it is, at it's very best, pointless.

Like writing blogs really....