Artisan delivers shoes gift to Papa Benedetto XV1 rather than use the Vatican trademen's entrance
Nicky Haslam is all over the place as he pushes his memoirs
Redeeming Features. Nice to see Lynn Barber recycling some of her old
Observer lines for her
Sunday Times Nicky dicky licky. And while he distances himself from himself by denying his own claim (in his book) that he had a romance in the 50s with Lord Snowdon (as he now is), I alight on a learned essayette Nicky wrote for Channel 4 book
25 x 4 titled "
Notes on the New Camp". Here he dilates on how camp has evolved over time - poor (Sir-to-be [for services to Twitter]) Stephen Fry is correctly described as "horribly, smugly camp" - but then goes and ruins it all by winking that the current Pope is camp because he wears Prada (shoes).
Nicky dicky licky
As we now know, Papa Benedetto XV1 may well be camp (scholarly nance division - see David Starkey for atheistic equivalent) but he does not wear Prada. The Pope's cobbler is a man from the Piedmont city of Novara, north Italy, called Adriano Stefanelli. His handmade leathers in ruby red are delivered to the Vatican as a gift - saving the pontiff 400 Euros a pair - and of course Stefanelli recoups by making no secret of his great honour on his trade
website. His other clients include the last President Bush and President Obama - I say "clients" but I am not persuaded that the shoes are not simply made and dispatched to the White House.
4 comments:
Barber shouldn't have interviewed Haslam yet again. She needs to get out more.
Hardly a club one would want to belong.
On one of your links Madame, the Social Shuttle, there is a tale of the orignations of the word 'camp' which came into use in, of all places-the convict colonies where down and out Brits were packed off to for minor infractions of the law.
It says it was because of the scareness of women-but many a young lad would be arrested for selling themselves for a few extra shillings and if arrested for this vile act Mr Plod would stamp his police file as K.A.M.P- "known as male prostitute". And as those colonies were run by more than their fair share of gay governors, the word eventually made it back to Mother England as in-talk for their pecadillo of lusting after a youngish man who they deemed 'camp', or havable and so on over the decades until it evolved and is finally laid at the feet of the Pontiff (literally!).
Is the Pope camp ?. His good friend the Aussie Cardinal Pell who dropped out of the race to defer to the older German is surrounded by a young team of eager priests who tend to his every need known collectively as "Pell's Angels". Now that's camp.
Thank you, I had no idea. You'd think Nicky would have alluded to the colonies.
Post a Comment