As an actual common person (regional, never miss an episode of The Chase, find the taste of cheese from a tube unapologetically delicious), the annual publication of Nicky Haslam’s Common List has turned into something of a high point of the festive calendar. Mr Haslam, an 85-year-old interior designer with a Chelsea practice who is friends with the actual Queen, is one of those posh people common people quite like. If you venture three lines down his Instagram page, you’ll find a picture of him clinking champagne flutes with David Cameron while wearing a hoodie and white jeans. Despite the connections, he’s funny, hard, unceremonious.
Nicky Haslam is one of those stately homos who embodies the acidic end of what happens to gay men when we reach our dotage, in all its gloriously vile specifics. Men of his age earned their withering judgements. If you want to know how and why, I’d heartily recommend Peter Parker’s Some Men of London compendium of writings about homosexuality between the end of World War II and legalisation beginning in 1967. Volume 2 has just been published. It makes for riveting, startling, often horrifyingly comprehensive reading.
