I just ran into this post tha belongs to the very origins of Loveartnotpeople when it was in English, the title of this 2023 post is its original title:
Chanel & Truffles
‘Rachel Johnson is Boris and Jo’s sister. Boris is the Tory Mayor of London and Jo has just been appointed head of the No.10 Downing Street Policy Unit. Brilliant move by Cameron. The only way to neutralise any Johnson seems to be to put another member of the family to compete with him (…or her). I met Rachel at the typical London ‘elite’ event. It was ‘truffle’ season and I was invited by my friend Marlon Abela to a dinner party at one of his many venues in the Mayfair area. He is a great guy but he is a London Russian without being so, if you know what I mean. Everything with the Abela touch has certain luxury blandness as if American germophobia had met Moscovian Plutocrat regimented ambition. The outcome is bland boredom where the utterance of an idea has the potential to threaten the whole social order. The truffles were presented by a former Bond Girl or, to be more accurate, in homage to this already yesterday’s Chanel 5 whose name I do not recall but everybody remember because she shone during the early 90s when Wynne Morgan was King of Anabells. We are talking about Lady Di dancing there before her marriage. It is even possible that her taste for new money comes from there. As usual, I arribe fashionably late as the Hispanic Countess Olenska that I am and the two A level girls were already drunk, especially the model that could not complete full sentences. I remember thinking that it was going to be a great night and it was.
On my table, to my right, there was Rachel Johnson. We clicked immediately. She was self deprecating in an English Upper Class to which she does not belong or maybe she does now. Like a public school boy, the first thing they tend to do is to horrify the our members of the table. She was open about her sex life and by open I mean, the husband was part of the discussion not as a participant but as the butt of the jokes. His looks gave her the reason. He was the typical nerdy public school specimen expected in those events but in this case the brutish behaviour had been hoovered by her. It was as if she was the bread winner and wanted to leave that very clear for all to see.
Rachel, however, made my evening, first and foremost, flirting like there was no tomorrow. If I were straight, this would have ended up as in many other escapades in that area with a fuck in the loo. Immediately, my date for the night, Mieka Siewak was annoyed at how rapidly Rachel and I clicked and it should be reminded that both Miecka and I were aspiring a climbing in this society. This was a career that I abandoned soon later but Mieka was a woman of faith so she might still be trying. I knew that she wouldnt do well because she tended to moralise the actions of people in such environment. Such moralisation can only come from her very Protestant country of origin: the United States. Of course, I did the opposite. I did trust the Johnson girl. What could go wrong?
Truffles and Chanel, Again
The truth is that Rachel is likeable and funny in a male kind of way. The only kind of way. I am not being mysoginistic but pointing out at how woke cultural depleted females from humor probably because in the modern era, they had so many victories that have not time to be funny. We started with practical jokes from the very beginning. Mine consisted of smuggling truffles in all her pockets. That truffle had no taste but stank. I knew she already was a Cañette with double ‘t’ as in Rockettes when two weeks later I received an invitation to a dinner party that had her at one end of the table and her friends celebrating her for being her and, let me say, that it is indeed something to celebrate. I like the girl. Her friends however were slightly off. Too poor for what they claimed to do and too old for the prowesses they said they engaged in. The only one I knew there was Wilkinson, the gallerist whom I provoked all night saying things like: the art market is dead or the only art today is performance art. What can you expect from Alex Katz’s dealer.
I arrived fashionably, but unintentionally so, late and I engaged in a two hour hard core chat with a lovely lady whose looks were not too different to those of Camila Parker Bowles. It was actually an interrogation which subtext was a a very simple question: How someone like you got to a table with people like us. The beauty of the tennis match resided in the syncopated change of registers: one question was about love and the following would go as low as “why do you leave in Montagu Square? Why so far?! To what she added: ‘Oh, it must be awfully painful to commute everyday to where the real people are’. I said: ‘South Ken?’. She said: ‘Yes’. I rest my case…
Eaton, Oxford… The Bullingdon
At this point, humour is to the English a relic where they can still see a totality that is not but a spectre of a glorious past. Their profound melancholy turns, at times, into self sabotage. (Comment from today 2023: How prophetic this paragraph would become?). Rachel was fun but scared of an undefined something. To be around that class adds up to a hauntology. Andrew Pierce with the Daily Mail said a while ago: ‘Every since a certain flamboyant blond became London mayor, speculation has been incessant that it wouldn’t be long before a Johnson moved into 10 Downing Street’. Few expected that the first one through the door wouldn’t be Boris, but his little-known brother JO. The Tory MP for Orpington, 41, was last week appointed head of the No.10 policy unit. Jo, by contrast, is, in many respect, ‘a typical member of the family’, said Andrew Gimson in the London Evening Standard. ‘He has blond hair, plays cricket and rides a bycicle’. He went to Eton and Oxford, joined the Bullingdon Club and became first a journalist, then a politician. And, of course he wants to be ‘prime minister’. But he’s a very different character from Boris. Where BoJo is ‘a show off and a rist taker’, JoJo is a diffident team player. He apparently relishes his low profile, claiming to have undergone a ‘humour-ectomy’.
What surprised me about Rachel was her willingness to fit in through a rejection of everybody. As strategy it wasn’t bad but the artistry should not be that obvious. Let’s remember that theatre is the opposite of art, according to Diderot and when the pose is noticed, elegance ends. I am a bad liar and to make things worse, I tend to feel other people’s pain a bit too much. Of course, I never had a chance among the nice but mean for the sake of it Chelsea crowd Those who know the Johnson paterfamilias, Stanley, remark that it was his ‘single minded ambition’ to create a ‘new political and journalistic dynasty’ what has driven is offspring. The patriarchal dogma of futurity is something that one pays with blood because the present as ephemeral as it is cannot be bought back. His raised his four children from his first marriage in an atmosphere of feverish competition. They were encouraged to beat each other at table tennis, ‘running, jumping, eating the hottest mince pies, coming first at school or simply having the blondest hair’. Rachel ‘was expected to read out leaders from The Times at the age of four’. When Jo got his first class degree, Rachel rang Boris to tell him the ‘terrible news’.
Post Scriptum: Rachel & Neva
I could see that mandate in her willingness to fit among the boys. There is something of Neva’a crossdressing for being accepted by the boys in Rachel. Neva is the heroine in Sally Gardner’s latest novel The Weather Woman in her abrasive use of sociality to survive as a talented women in a hostile environment. That is why when she saw the gay man she fancied and looked like a man, she dared to be bold enough to show me her tits centimetres from her husband. It was her little victory. What that victory did not take into account were my feelings of being the emotional bin in a barren emotionless place. I am queer and here and I am used to it.
Written by Rodrigo Canete.