two-twenty

death imitates art

Great, just what we need, another addiction. Daphne, friend of two-twenty and occasional fashion critic / spotter of trannies, got us hooked on the Daily Telegraph obits with this "free taste":

Jennifer Ross Obituary | Daily Telegraph

It's really less of an obit and more of a, well, concise history of the decline and fall of the English aristocracy. To wit:

In 1942 Jennifer, already pregnant, married Robert Heber-Percy and entered a most unusual ménage. Heber-Percy had been living at Faringdon for a decade as the boyfriend of Lord Berners, the composer and eccentric known for his waspish sense of humour and his exotic way of life: guests were summoned to dinner by a music box in the hall; the doves that flew about were dyed many and various colours (inadvertently making them vulnerable to predators)...

Heber-Percy himself was a wild figure, known as "the Mad Boy" in Berners's circle. He had done more than enough to earn the sobriquet... He once nearly killed a woman in Salzburg by throwing a tankard from a restaurant, attempted to commit suicide and had to be removed heavily tranquilised. When he arrived in Florence he was "carried into the hotel in a semi-conscious state still dressed in his Tyrolean costume and with his hair hanging all over his face". At Amalfi he hit Berners over the head with a button-hook when Berners, wary of being spotted at the table with a young man sporting a bright red shirt, refused to accompany him to breakfast on the terrace.

When pressed, Daphne kindly forwarded on another fix, leading us blindly, indeed helplessly, down the slippery slope to full-fledged dependence. An auspicious beginning:

GRAHAM MASON, the journalist who has died aged 59, was in the 1980s the drunkest man in the Coach and Horses, the pub in Soho where, in the half century after the Second World War, a tragicomedy was played out nightly by its regulars.

leads to a brilliant and summary end:

[He] cooked Mediterranean food well, liked Piero della Francesca and Fidelio, choral evensong on the Third Programme and fireworks. After Marsh Dunbar's death in 2001, with almost all his friends dead, he sat imprisoned by emphysema in his flat, with a cylinder of oxygen by his armchair and bottles of white wine by his elbow, looking out over the Thames, still very angry.

Between those two gems lie sixteen additional paragraphs describing, among other things, Mr. Mason's associations with "many of the painters as well as the writers, actors, layabouts, retired prostitutes, stagehands and hopeless cases that then gave Soho its flavour."

Enjoy.

Graham Mason Obituary | Daily Telegraph