The Cotswolds continues to deliver up the fabulous. To be fair, the man I have in mind is a resident of Jersey over visiting friends of ours for a long weekend, which is how we came to make his acquaintance at a dinner party last night. Adrian is a hairstylist with more than a passing resemblance to David Byrne—lanky, NBA-height, and a deliberate dresser (last night’s ensemble featured a plaid shirt of earth tones accessorised with a woolen waistcoat, chunky silver bracelet, matching cuff links, and collar pin). I knew the dinner party was going to be a success early on when he responded to my question of how he ended up in Jersey with a story that covered his first job in London styling wigs for Barbara Windsor, moving on to being David Bowie’s Chelsea neighbor, and culminating in a fateful evening in 1973 at Sombrero’s nightclub in Ken High Street (where he used to dance with Jerry Hall and Barbara Hulanicki of Biba) when he fell off his platforms and ended up in St. George’s hospital on New Year’s Eve, after which he decided his love affair with London was over and headed for the Channel Islands. He has lived there happily ever since with a pointer and a pussy for company. Somehow my own retreat to the rural life seems the most loathsome bourgeois, vanilla, pedestrian odyssey ever, except for the part where I get to meet the Adrians of the world.
