Having ardently wished, whilst I was watching My Fair Lady, that I was instead watching Shakespeare in somebody’s garden, I naturally took myself off the following week to see Shakespeare in somebody’s garden.

The thing about Shakespeare is that it was written to be performed. We need to see it on the stage, but of course that’s often not how we start. We ‘do’ at least two Shakespeare plays during our school years; for some people that’ s enough: they’re done with Shakespeare and never darken his doors again, which is a pity. If we were lucky enough and our enthusiastic teachers took us to see Shakespeare on stage, then that probably kickstarted our enthusiasm, we got the jokes and doubled down on our homework. I was lucky at school to have a brilliant English teacher so that learning Shakespeare with her was a joy and a revelation, notwithstanding the fact that she was deeply in love with Kit Marlowe and never lost an opportunity to bring him into a lesson, whether he belonged there or not. Then there were the films that kept the flame burning – Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet and Richard Branagh’s Henry V are the ones that stick in my mind.

So this was As You Like It at Arundel Castle, with the highly theatrical backdrop of the Collector Earl’s garden, opened by the King in 2008 to honour the 14^th Earl and his famous art collection; he was a patron of Inigo Jones and quite apart from the Jacobean/Italianate drama of the planting, the various buildings in the garden – notably Oberon’s Palace - were based on Inigo Jones designs, made in green oak. So the whole thing is spiky and dramatic and kind of made for a Shakespeare performance.

Shakespeare, as we understand him, seems to have been permanently writing under pressure, dashing off the pages to get the thing on the stage as quick as possible. He never seemed to need those breaks to just look out of the window or make cups of tea and eat digestive biscuits. He wouldn't have been scrolling idly through parrot videos. The words seemed to form unbidden at the end of his pen (1,700 new words he added to our language). And As You Like It was written under more pressure even than normal since the hateful rival theatre company, The Admiral’s Men, (Boo!) were performing at the Rose Theatre down the road: their play was Anthony Munday’s work on the legend of Robin Hood, snappily entitled The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington, and the punters were queueing around the block. Shakespeare needed to find something equally compelling to stop Munday in his tracks before he wrote an annoyingly gripping sequel. In the Elizabethan era the box office choice for pulling in the crowds were outlaws. They couldn’t get enough of them. Banished figures and rebels who could play havoc with the social order and fossick about in the woods in ‘disguises’, were absolute catnip to those audiences. And if there could be some messing about with gender as well then the comic potential and the sexual confusion was even better and more hilarious.

There's a particularly good Richmal Compton William story called William holds the Stage, in which William gets involved with a production of Hamlet, very funny if you can get hold of it.

I have always loved the fact that in Shakespeare’s plays a man’s beloved only has to put on some hose and a jaunty hat with a feather in it to instantly be transformed into a man and therefore impenetrably disguised. Works every time. And the speed with which they fall in love! Barely had you got your frock off, pulled on those manly hose and stuck an outlaw-ish hat on your head than some shepherdess was head over heels in love with you, neglecting her sheep and making a fool of herself.

So Shakespeare speedily put pen to paper and based his new play on Thomas Lodge’s romance Rosalynd, written 10 years earlier. He added in a few extras like Touchstone and Jacques and hey presto there was his new pastoral romance featuring Dukes and banishment and gender bafflement and those must-have outlaws. No such thing as plagiarism in those days, you cheerfully used legends and old stories and somebody else’s copy; whatever came to hand. In another life, our Mr Shakespeare would probably have been a phone-tapping journalist. He didn’t even bother to change the heroine’s name. As Bertie Wooster said to Jeeves, ‘I suppose half the time Shakespeare just shoved down anything that came into his head’.

Illyria are a touring theatre company who’ve been going for 35 years – they’re just what you want for Shakespeare and I could picture some scamp of an Elizabethan boy dashing to the theatre waving the latest pages of script for them to work on. Five players who exude wonderful energy: they’re young and funny and perform their lightning costume changes at high speed. They sing and make jokes! Everybody necessarily plays several parts with minimal alteration and you happily go along with it. In this production, a non-binary actor called Julian plays Rosalind which is admirably Shakespearean. And when the play moves to the forest of Arden (outlaw alert!) minimal set changes consist of the first two actors on stage casually swivelling round some pop-up wooden trees as part of the backdrop. So so good. Go and see them if you can: they do all sorts including Gilbert and Sullivan and I would travel a long way to see their Pride and Prejudice. If troupes like this performed regularly at schools there would be less mumbling about removing Shakespeare from the curriculum, and ‘is he really relevant these days?’.

Nearly murdered in my bed

So most of you won’t get this, but I had a very horrid experience the night before last. Do not judge me. Beano had as usual retired to his dressing room – having a dog like him is like being married to the grumpy old Major husband from an Agatha Christie story – but then decides to come and jump on my bed in the small hours. The dog not the husband. He has a few goes at hopping onto the bed - I did put a wooden wine box at the side to help him, but he ignores that – so I always have to put the light on then he can jump up. Yes, I know, rod, back etc. And when I turned the light on THERE WAS A MASSIVE SPIDER on the bed right next to me. Right there on my book. (Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson if you’re interested) but it was galloping away as if by turning on the light I had interrupted him in some nefarious activity. I think Beano probably saved my life and if I hadn’t turned the light on, that thing would’ve had its little hands around my neck.

Obviously, I screamed very loudly which sent the Major right back to his dressing room. Flung the duvet and all the bedding onto the floor and then wasn’t sure how to proceed. Eventually, I dragged it all out into the landing and decided to get a cup of tea and read my book while I calmed down but the book was under the duvet with the YOU KNOW WHAT and had to be extracted, with difficulty. Anyway, a sleepless night for all. Just what were all those lavender bags with which I festoon my headboard doing if not repelling those things? Do they think they’re there for decoration? And what about all those gnarled conkers on the windowsill? So the next day the valance had to come off the bed because that just provides them with an easy access to climb on my bed and torture me. I flung the duvet and its probable contents out of the window rather than carry it downstairs. Moved all the furniture and hoovered the whole room to root out any fugitives. Sprayed copious amounts of Leg It, so the whole room smells minty fresh. And I’ve finally ordered, as I’ve meant to do for years, a mesh frame to go over my window for when the window’s open, which it always is.

People have said, a little unsympathetically I feel, that I am manifesting those things by being so scared of them. There’s something lacking in this argument which I can’t quite put my finger on. And no, I’m not buying the fact that they’re more frightened of people than I am of them. If you’re so frightened of people, why climb up to a first storey window, haul yourself over a barricade of conkers, and nestle up close to an actual person? So last night I made the Major come and sleep on my bed instead of in his dressing room with his old school photos and his war medals which he did with very bad grace.

Wake up, boiler

It was also an exciting day yesterday because I had my first oil delivery in several months. I was almost out in March and got a quotation for 500 litres of fuel oil: £685. Naturally I decided to turn my boiler off and see what happened with the war and the oil companies. In common with many other people, the delivery man told me. I thought it was odd that I ordered it on a Tuesday and it arrived on a Wednesday.: they’re clearly not very busy. By now it was a more reasonable £446 for 500 litres.

The price is still coming down, the driver told me, yet nothing has really changed in the Middle East. Makes you almost think that it’s the oil companies ratcheting up the price for their own benefit, doesn’t it? He spoke darkly about the price of red diesel having gone into the stratosphere: it’s risen by anything between 50 and 70% and is creeping closer to the price of normal diesel, another nail in the coffin of the farmers to put the lid on their unbelievably rotten year.

‘This oil’s come from Norway’, said my very chatty tanker driver, who clearly has plenty of time on his hands now that none of us want oil, ‘Now that David Milliband won’t let us drill in the North Sea, Norway drill and we buy it back from them.’ 40% of our gas comes from Norway.

the dog days of summer

My chickens have survived the heatwave admirably. Mary Bennet and Mrs. Rochester are even laying, which is magnificent of them. They’re a bit fed up with the straw-like sparsity of the grass so when I grate carrot into their breakfast, I notice that the carrot is what they fall upon. If I water a shrub or a plant, the bantams immediately descend on the wet patch on the flowerbed and lie there cooling their tummies. They gaze into Beano's paddling pool as if they'd quite like to hop in. The farmers harvested the maize from the field next door to me and I then went and picked up all the abandoned corncobs. Although it was technically sweetcorn, it was pretty dry so I give it to the chickens. They’re pretty lazy and if I give them a whole cob to peck at they look at me as if I’m bonkers. What they like me to do is shave it off with a sharp knife for them. They’d probably prefer a tin of Jolly Green Giant sweetcorn, but that’s not happening.

Mary Bennet has been annoying the neighbours: as soon as her little electric door opens in the morning, she is hopping over the tall fence into their garden and rattling around in there shrieking and carrying on like a teenage girl. I’m not sure she’s not laying in there too, and trying to do a Jemima Puddleduck, collecting a nestful of eggs and then surprising us all with a little cavalcade of chicks. Well, that would surprise us all because we don’t have a cockerel, so bad luck Mary. I’ve had to take the unprecedented measure of clipping her wings which I do feel bad about but she mustn’t go and trespass on the neighbours, it’s rude.

Tremendous news that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are returning to our shores! I feel it will add to the gaiety of the nation, which we need, although possibly not for the Prince and Princess of Wales. But I hope it will actually be a comfort for our King, especially when he’s not well, to see his son and his family, get to know his grandchildren and to know that they are, as it were, gathered under his mantle. The Return of the Prodigal Son. There are few things that can give a parent more grief than a child in a huff on the other side of the world.

We don’t as yet know where the Sussexes are going to put down their roots in the UK but my bet is Althrop; maybe Uncle Charles Spencer has given them a farmhouse. But just in case they have decided to settle in the county with which they share their name then I expect they will want things to do. I don't think it's overstretching it to suggest that they have some bridges to mend here in the UK, and I have the perfect volunteering project for you in Sussex, Meghan. It fits in nicely with the school run, which I know you’ll want to do yourself, and they’re very child-friendly hours. Of course you may not end up anywhere near Sussex but you could do worse than start a charity of your own along these lines wherever you go, given that you love your garden and you love cooking and would most likely jump at the chance to support those at the fragile end of society. It would be a huge step towards your redemption to help those people who have for whatever reason not had a fair wind in life, and lack the resources to fill their own sails.

I'm referring to the community garden near where I live in Petworth and honestly, it ticks every box. It’s a small charity and a brilliant initiative which not only feeds from the allotment those local families who need support, but also provides therapeutic and sociable gardening sessions for vulnerable adults, whether it’s watering, fruit picking, weeding or pricking out seedlings. I promise you, it’s not deadly dull and worthy: we have a laugh and as you probably know, in the majority of cases the volunteers benefit just as much as the recipients.

People volunteer for various reasons – one is from a place of generosity and wishing to share life's bounty but another can be from the opposite end of things. Somebody might want to volunteer because they too have experienced emptiness and want to alleviate the suffering of others who have experienced the same, and at the same time ease their own souls. It takes you right away from one’s own paltry preoccupations, and you get your hands dirty planting or weeding. I can't tell you how satisfactory it is to pull out buckets of bindweed and mare's tail. I know that you enjoy your own garden; here the volunteers get to share the produce too. One of the reasons I particularly thought of you, Meghan, is that it’s currently very much jam-making season, which I know has become your thing, and the community garden have a stall at the local farmers’ market where they sell jams and chutney made from their produce. When I joined a few months ago, they were very much in need of extra help in the kitchen, and still are.

There’s nothing especially glamorous about the garden; it’s literally several allotments strung together. California it’s not. But as well as the garden the charity have created, in a shed, a brilliant working and council-approved kitchen, with both gas and running water. There’s no great big American fridge, I’m afraid; we have to make do with cold boxes for whatever produce we bring in for lunch. We feed up to 30 people twice a week, with either soup and a baked potato or something like a quiche or a vegetable stew. Salad; hummous; no meat or fish involved. No edible flowers required in the salad or anything like that.

The only thing about working in the community kitchen, Meghan, and I know you can do it standing on your head because you’re a cook and you love feeding people, is that you have to have a hygiene certificate? But I imagine you must have this because you’ve been making jam to sell in California. And having been making jam myself this week for the garden, at my house because I have a council-approved kitchen, I take my hat off to you making jam regularly. Marmalade is my thing; it’s predictable and behaves so well. Jam is the devil’s work. It splatters and spits and burns, it hisses and boils over and chars the pans and seems to get everywhere. My arms (above my gloves) and even my face are dotted with dots of scalding jam: blessed are the jam makers with their scarred limbs. But you are doing it all the time so I expect you’ll take it in your stride.

There are strict rules here in the community kitchen, because it’s in a garden and there are vulnerable people involved, so only the cook can be in the kitchen and she must dress up in a chef’s coat and hat (my hat is home-made out of gingham, like a massive bath hat. I look like Mrs. Miggins in Blackadder) with every hair scraped back out of sight. But it's not a place where vanity matters and that in itself is deeply reassuring. We even have to put those J-cloth bootees over our shoes, like forensic scientists. So no bare feet, I’m afraid, and if I were you, I wouldn’t wear floaty oatmeal coloured linen either.

It’s not a glamorous look but you’ll agree with me, I’m sure, that cuffs trailing in the food (Nigella!) or loose hair or beards dangling over the food are not a great look either. Hygiene is paramount. But here’s another good thing – nothing is wasted. If there’s anything left over from lunch like quiche or cake then that goes into the food parcels as well, to add to vegetables and bread which is generously donated from Sødt, the bakery owned by my lovely Danish friend. You’d be so welcome, Meghan, because you’ll be anxious to make friends in the UK and there’s nothing like a truly welcoming charity to make you feel involved and at home. Nobody even knows anybody else’s surname. There’s just a compostable loo that you have to scatter wood shavings in, but you won’t mind that, will you?

The Queen’s Jeans

You can tell it’s August because there was a story in the papers about the Queen wearing denim. Just fancy! Camilla was spotted in Ballater with her sister Annabel and her granddaughter, doing a spot of shopping and wearing jeans. Well, good for her.

I’m not back in jeans yet because it’s too hot and don’t like wearing anything on my legs between April and October but Scotland is always different. When we went on our annual fishing trip to Scotland back in the 70s in the 80s we had to remember when packing that the climate was very different up there. And yet every single time I was caught out without a night dress, or a hot water bottle, or sufficient jerseys and socks.

How on earth did we manage without denim? There’s nothing new about woven cloth or twisted fibres – humans have been weaving for some 30,000 years. Although from studies of the human louse (those scientists get the best jobs) there is evidence that when homo sapiens started moving north, perhaps 100,000 years ago, away from the warm climate of Africa, they needed to develop some sort of clothing to keep themselves warm. Animal skins were followed later by woven cloth.

From 1347 onwards Chieri near Turin in Italy was producing the precursor to actual denim, a stout rugged fabric that was used for working clothes and ships’ sails. Denim as we know it seems to have developed in the 17^th century, in Nîmes, where weavers created twill fabric which became known as ‘serge de Nîmes’. I never really knew what constituted twill, do you? But apparently it’s made when the horizontal weft threads are passed over one or more vertical warp threads (denim is 3/1), shifting the pattern by one thread each row (keep up) which creates diagonal lines and makes for a strong fabric, albeit one that doesn’t breathe freely and so isn’t great in hot weather. Fustian is the ancestor of denim and dates from around 200 AD in Egypt; it was traditionally a coarse fabric for workers’ clothes or prison clothing, and the use of fustian working clothes have long been associated with radical working-class movements; a fustian jacket was literally a badge of your working-class credentials. Pavel Ferapontovich Antipov, father of Pasha in Dr Zhivago, would've been all over a fustian jacket.

It wasn’t until 1873, when Levi Strauss moved to San Francisco and found himself a tailor to be his partner, that the first jeans, with riveted copper studs, were made as tough working clothes. Then there was the question of colour. Blue was historically a rare and expensive colour: in mediaeval times, blue could only really be made from crushing lapis lazuli, as expensive as gold, and therefore was only used in art for somebody special or sacred like the Virgin Mary. The blue embroidery in the Bayeux Tapestry was made using woad (isatis tinctoria), which is a common plant in Europe, from the mustard family. Modern day jeans used indigo for the dye, not woad. Indigo (indigofera tinctoria) came from Asia and the colour was much stronger: woad produced a more muted blue. Napoleon’s army were traditionally dressed in imperial blue uniforms which used dye from indigo, until British blockades cut off the indigo supplies so that from 1806 Napoleon’s men had to dress in undyed white wool coats, poor things. I think white wool coats must’ve been rather smart but perhaps not so practical in wartime.

All of which is I’m sure well known to the Queen as she trotted round doing her shopping in Ballater, which wouldn’t have taken her long because from memory there isn’t a lot to buy in Ballater. As far as I remember, when Soph and I visited Balmoral, we had a toasted sandwich in Ballater, went to a bookshop and prudently decided not to enter our terriers in the dog show that was going on. This was followed by the now traditional visit to the Ballater vet for Dennis, who like me is creating a Which guide to vets in the United Kingdom. You can read Soph’s Substack from that week HERE - I’d forgotten all about the Irn Bru sausages which were such a feature of the Ballater butcher.

Honey from the ashes

Rather a touching story in the Guardian and the Times this week about honey in Gaza. A beekeeper and father of seven children, Ibrahim Naji al-Dabba. has been reduced from 400 hives to 35. Before the war he didn’t just produce honey; he bred queen bees and developed new bee strains suited to the climate. Then had to start all over again from nothing: initially he bought three new beehives and put them on the roof of a ruined building and is now the owner of 35 hives.

There were 1000 beekeepers in Gaza before the war and beehives were kept on the agricultural areas near the borders where there were flowers and trees for the bees to forage around; now there are less than 100 beekeepers and no orchards, no agricultural land. They are slowly rebuilding their hives, keeping the bees on rooftops in rudimentary hives and supplementing their food with sugar water. Presumably all that is left are a few weeds growing in the ruins of the concrete buildings, the odd ornamental tree or whatever determined greenery is pushing up through the cracks in the ground. It’s going to be tough going for them.

Some great TV

Late to this – it came out in January – but last weekend we started watching Waiting for the Out, the BBC 6-part series adapted from Andy West’s book about his experiences teaching philosophy in a men’s prison. Josh Finan (The Responder, Say Nothing) plays Dan, who has plenty of issues of his own before he even starts with the prisoners’, and then there’s anger, guilt and redemption to be addressed. Blimey, it’s not always a very easy watch but it’s compelling stuff. Fleeting expressions chase themselves over Dan's face like the wind on a wheatfield. We’re rooting for him and it makes you think, which is what we want, isn’t it?

When did you last fall in love with a pair of shoes? Properly fall in love I mean, not just ‘these are OK’. Or ‘I bought them online and I can’t be bothered to send them back so they’ll have to do’? I mean life-changing shoes, the sort of shoes that speak to you. Can you actually remember when a pair of shoes seemed so desirable that they would change your life forever? I bet Marie Antoinette thought that every new pair of slippers she ordered were magnificent. You could be a different person in those shoes, you think, (at this point I hear my mother’s despairing voice saying, But what will you wear them with?) I think the last pair of shoes I bought that brought me real joy was about 20 years ago – pale pistachio coloured suede from L.K. Bennet (gone), I have them still. I may even have left the box open in my bedroom for a couple of days because they cheered me so much. Where are they now? Those joy-givers?

Shoes are a big part of our life from quite early on. I can remember painful sessions in John Lewis buying shoes for my children when the ones they really really wanted weren’t available or were absolutely not suitable for school. No, you're not having Velcro on them. Once they’d been measured and the assistant bought a selection of boxes in the correct size, their little faces would fall. You could always tell when they loved a pair of shoes because they would skip along doing their practice walk even if they were too small and hurt like hell. Whereas if they hated the shoes, they would slump along scuffing their toes like Pilgrim heading for the Slough of Despond. Or they would want Velcro and I didn’t. Soph desperately wanted those green gumboots with frog faces on them and for some reason, (I'm ashamed now) I didn’t get them for her. She did not take this lying down and I promise you that it has not been forgotten. Thirty-something years later, she still brings it up. I remember Henry aged about three in John Lewis in Edinburgh, sent off to do his practice walk, motoring off towards the escalator and slowly disappearing downwards out of sight.

Grace Makutse fell in love with some blue shoes in the Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency books by Alexander McCall Smith. Whereas Mma Ramotswe being of traditional build favours large comfortable shoes, Mma Makutse is lured by the siren call of those narrow, pinchy but fashionable blue shoes. Those shoes spoke to Mma Makutse and not just metaphorically. They did actually speak and give her advice, but that needn’t concern us here. Grace was not going to be fobbed off with wide-fitting comfort shoes and well done her.

I slightly blame Paul McCartney for the decline of shoes because he was the first person I ever remember who broke the rules by wantonly wearing trainers with a suit. Even Diana, Princess of Wales, who changed life for a lot of us by only ever wearing flat shoes and thus saved us all from the tyranny of high heels back in the 80s, didn’t go that far. Now we wear trainers and sneakers with everything which is great until that one moment when you need to look presentable.

Sorry to you men out there, who most likely don't want to read about ladies’ shoes. And if you do, then carry on; nobody is judging here.

This problem is on my mind because I have a friend who’s going to a wedding. Let’s call her Cinderella. She’s wearing a knee-length dress, but what is she to do about shoes? She thinks her old ones are dated and a bit dull but most new ones are frankly pretty ugly, if we're honest. If you look online, the assumption is that if you’re looking for presentable shoes with non-crazy heels, then you must be so old that you need extra-wide fitting or even orthopaedic shoes. Yippee, let’s have some of those. We're going to die soon anyway. An old friend of ours, when he was about 80, murmured that he fancied a new suit. You won't be needing one of those, said his wife briskly. It's a bit the same with buying shoes. The clear implication is that as we totter towards the grave all we want is comfort. ‘Look at these ones with velcro in a lovely wide fitting; practical and comfy.’

OK, so if we were the Princess of Wales we might wear Aquazzura or Gianvito Rossi with heels like needles, or Jimmy Choo (85mm). But even if we were willing to canter about in high heels – and I’m full of admiration for the way Catherine can gracefully squat down to talk to a small child and then effortlessly stand up again in those heels – and even supposing we wanted to spend that much money, can we just talk about the points on shoes? There are pointed shoes that work and there are pointed shoes that look – I’m sorry to say this – plain dodgy. And those dodgy ones are the ones where the angle of the point is not quite sharp enough. I can’t, not being a mathematician, put it any clearer than that. It’s a subtle difference, but between an elegant pointed shoe (Emma Hope, RIP) and a dubious one there is a world of difference. Another minefield.

Then of course there is the fact that when you have bought or if you have bought the shoes of your dreams, somebody might draw attention to them. It doesn't matter so much these days – we're probably quite pleased and happy to share the details. I still blush to remember how when I was about 19 my mother-in-law to be, in a drawing room full of grand French people, exclaimed 'New shoes!’ so that every world-weary French eye swivelled towards my feet, who tried to bury themselves under the sofa. They were probably Topshop or something.

I have a pair of suede shoes that I call my funeral shoes, perfectly okay without being earthshattering, 2 inch block heels, nothing to frighten the horses. The sort of thing you might wear to go racing. They may have come from Blue Velvet in the Kings Road a decade ago. Olive Aubrey had pretty shoes, but she’s gone now. Where are the gorgeous shoes that you want to wear to your child’s wedding, for example? They don’t exist, that’s where. Not for under £700. I ask a few friends and they mostly say, well, Ferragamo, Vivaaia, or they’ve kept their old shoes. There’s a gap in the market, folks.

I had a dear friend whose fortunes waxed and waned and when things were prospering, she liked to buy something splendid. It might be a beautiful bit of old broken statuary or a Buff Orpington hen but it would always be something thrilling to gladden the heart. Once it was a pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes of surpassing gorgeousness. There was never any thought of practicality of the ‘what will you wear them with?’ variety. I applauded her single-minded pursuit of the fabulous and unusual. We passed the shoes around and handled them reverently as if they were a new baby. It mattered to my friend not at all when the deerhound puppy chewed one of the shoes and rendered them unwearable. They were still a Beautiful Thing to be displayed on a shelf and admired and anyway dogs were more important than shoes.

I’m not sure when it would’ve been that shoes turned from being an necessity, something to separate the sole of your foot from the mud upon which you walked, to being a desirable thing of themselves, worthy of notice: envy, even. Marie Antoinette, obviously. The Victorians, maybe, apart from all those buttons. In Kings Lynn in 1845 the town boosted 67 boot and shoemakers. Sixty seven! Deary me, Chichester used to have Russell and Bromley and not much else and even they’ve closed down now.

Meanwhile Cinderella has given up with the online search and her sister is sending her a pair of shoes to wear, which is laudable and very Pride and Prejudice.

In mediaeval days, there would be a single piece of leather drawn up around your foot and laced. Then there was the turnstyle shape of a shoe in which the upper and the sole were stitched together inside out, then soaked to make them supple and reversed. This kept the stitches on the inside and saved them from wear and tear. I think we're probably due for a renewal of this.

Shoes to slippers

Saw My Fair Lady this week at the Chichester Theatre. I hadn’t heard much about the production or the names of any the cast, so I had no intimation of what to expect, and the reviews were largely four star, full of the usual platitudes and inevitably most of them with the word luvverley in the title. Pygmalion was first performed in Germany in 1913, the year my father was born, then in London in 1914. Thereafter it morphed into various productions of My Fair Lady, famously and unbeatably with Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn.

I promise you, I’m not against musicals per se even if they’re not exactly my first choice. (My first choice is Shakespeare somebody's garden, with a picnic in the rain, and about four actors playing all the parts and changing costumes at speed in a little striped tent. The highlight of one was the executioner in Richard III dashing back onstage as the Queen Mother, having flung on a frock from beneath which his big boots peeped.) But I’ve seen some unforgettable musicals over the years and Oliver! which the Chichester Theatre put on in 2024, was great with the best Fagin ever.

So, My Fair Lady. First impression: noise. A sheer wall of noise. The actors for some reason hurled out their lines as if they were Englishman talking to foreigners. Eliza was played by Keziah Ibe in her first professional engagement. A fake cockney accent is never a pretty thing to hear and I have to say that this Eliza, although she had a lovely singing voice, brought its nail-on-a-blackboard piercingness to a new and awful level. Bertie Wooster used to refer to his Aunt Dahlia’s stentorian tones and how, if all else failed, she could make a living calling the cattle home across the Sands of Dee. I was getting Aunt Dahlia vibes. Henry Higgins shouted. Colonel Pickering shouted. A pair of ship’s stokers bellowing at each other across the deck of a trawler boat on a stormy night could’ve conversed with less effort. Then Mr. Doolittle’s big number: oh my. Fingers in ears. Dick Van Dyke, all is forgiven.

In the second half things improved. Everybody calmed down a bit. There are some good one-liners, most of them from Henry Higgins. I was drawn to Belinda Lang as Mrs Higgins purely because she spoke in nice measured tones. And we all heard her perfectly! Surely the whole point of a purpose-built theatre, with presumably much attention having being given to acoustics, is that the actors don’t have to bellow at the tops of their voices? (and I couldn’t help but notice that in the Brasserie where we had dinner before the play, the acoustics were particularly bad. On a small table of five the noise in a crowded room was so loud that you could barely hear your neighbour. Maybe some baffles in there?)

We know the story. Higgins wins his bet, he and Pickering slap each other on the back. They forget about Eliza and Eliza loses it and throws Higgins’ slippers at him. The colonel treated her well even when she was a flower girl; Higgins treats her badly even now she has well rounded vowels. Discuss. Higgins gets an earful. Eventually, all is resolved, after a fashion. I was interested to see how the jokes would play out in a play written 110 years ago whose hero is what you might call unreconstructed. Jokes for example about a girl’s having to bring a man his slippers, but they seemed to go down fine with the audience.

Home, with my ears ringing, to read my book. Edmund Crispin (his actual name was Bruce Montgomery) wrote beguiling whodunnits and his protagonist is an Oxford don called Gervase Fen. Not unlike Henry Higgins but cleverer and more restful.

I particularly love this passage when a Dr Boysenberry with whom Fen is in conversation says ‘ '‘You underestimate yourself, Professor Fen,’ he said; and when Fen, to whom this accusation was unfamiliar, vaguely demurred: “Ah, but indeed you do.”’ Lovely writing.

Still no rain and who’d be a farmer? Every day in the fields all around me, the poor Romanian guys who work there are lugging gigantic pipes for irrigation from one place to another in the broiling sun, just so we can have broccoli. Or maize in the next field. I can never quite work out whether the water is coming from: boreholes or local private reservoirs, filled from the river Rother during the winter months, or from underground or what, but it’s miraculous when the temperatures are in the 30s, to see this fine mist from a self-winding turbine sprinkler which cranks slowly round at night. I’m glad for the wildlife around here because there are at least some puddles and wet patches for them in the morning.

I have bowls of water all around the garden for the birds as well as the hens, and a plate of water filled with pebbles supposedly for the bees so they don’t drown. Of course they insist on drinking from the hens’ water and drown anyway. I have kind neighbours who look after my chickens when I’m away and I always leave watering cans around as a broad hint because people are so good about feeding chickens but don't worry so much about their having only an inch of scummy water, and it would be unreasonable for me to expect that they would scrub out the water bowls. But chickens do love clean water. If ever I’m watering the pots (we don’t have a hose pipe ban here, yet) and there is a trickle of water running along the ground, the hens will rush to drink from it. Every so often I look up watering systems for hens, with moving water, like mini fountains, and then I tell myself not to be so silly and extravagant. But has anyone bought or created anything like that for their spoilt chickens?

Some of you might remember that there was a little incident with Dennis on a farm in Wiltshire and I lost my phone. Two months later, it’s been found and returned to me, a bit cracked on the screen from sheepy hooves but otherwise fine and working because in all that time there has not been one drop of rain. So, you know, every cloud.

Camping

When I see a picture of festivals and in particular my younger daughter at a festival with their tent last week, it makes me think of the tents we used to sleep in at Pony Club camp back in the 1960s. Little two-man tents which always had a leak and ants, where everything was damp and the lilo used to subside in the night. We weren’t always in tents – occasionally there were makeshift dormitories. The lads’ quarters above the stables at Folkestone Racecourse, for example. I can still remember what those mattresses and those pillows looked like, and let’s face it most 10-year-olds are notoriously un-fussy about bedding. Probably better in a tent, even with the dew and the grasshoppers.

For those of us lucky enough to have ponies and even luckier to have had the army of volunteers, retired majors and ‘grown up’ children who had graduated from the pony club and then become instructors, the summer camp was a unique experience.

It provided a perfect combination of discipline – because safety had to be considered, even back then in the carefree 60s, and it was important that you looked after your pony rigorously – and independence. A lot of growing up was done at pony club camp, in every sort of way. Obviously my first kiss was at Pony Club camp. A lovely boy called Richard with a smart chestnut pony with white socks; I remember the pony better than him.

My friend Jane and I always went to camp together on our very similar grey ponies, mine a homebred New Forest pony called Conker and hers was my sister’s old pony called Wimoweh (there was a song…) bought by our mother as a three year-old from a local dealer in Kent called Mr. Sankey for something like a tenner. We always rode our ponies bareback in the summer and sometimes without bridles too, which was proper showing off. We liked to see if we could do our very basic dressage tests without saddles or bridles and make our ponies do all the turns and transitions just using our legs. I think we probably fell off a lot and serve us right: when we finally got to Pony Club camp the ponies weren’t used to saddles and got something called girth galls round their tummies, so we did the rest of the camp bareback, much to our joy.

The education of both children and ponies leapt forward exponentially at camp because everybody wanted to keep up with everybody else: the other people were swimming in the river with their ponies so you did, children and ponies became braver, nobody fussed about food because there wasn’t much choice and you were very hungry. The ponies became fitter and sleeker and better behaved as the week went on, the children became dirtier and worse behaved but happier and more courageous. They also got tired – fuelled by Cherryade, sherbert flying saucers or illicit alcohol and raging hormones, depending on age. There was a family we knew in Scotland whose children slept in their lorry at camp. Their old nanny used to come over each morning and make their beds. One morning poor Nanny had to clean up sick in the lorry as well.

When Rosie was at camp in the Borders, I did a night in a caravan as nightwatchmen; the parents took turns. The idea was to prevent too much flitting from girls’ to boys’ caravans. Good luck with that. It had been a day of casualties, a pony had cut itself crossing the river and needed stitches, and the racehorse lent to Rosie for the week had stuck her foot through her gate and skinned herself badly. But the instructors take it all in their stride. These are calm empire-building women. You feel that those women could sort out the national health service and the small boats and still be home to cook dinner.

As the night watchmen I was aware that I’d become the enemy. Rosie looked at me warily as if I might produce clean underwear for her or athletes foot spray. The lovely clean caravan that we had parked there on day one (£20 in a farm sale) for her and her friend Charlotte was now a litter of sweet papers, underwear, shavings, tail bandages, empty bottles of Irn Bru, wet towels and dirty riding boots.

I did the rounds at 11.30pm, wondering if nine children should really be sleeping in one caravan, then retired with a glass of wine and a book to my own caravan. The party zone was a tiny caravan, technically the home of two 16 year-old boys, but by midnight was crammed with determined teenage partygoers. By 2 am most of them had gone back to their own caravans though the odd shadow flitted by, unchallenged by a 44 year-old woman reading a Harry Potter book. At 2:30am everything had pretty much calmed down when there was a tumultuous crashing and banging; a big chestnut horse had cast himself in his stable – which is when a horse rolls or get stuck lying down and cannot get to its feet. By the time we’d all rushed there with our torches, he’d given a final kick and got up, sweaty and covered in straw, looking at us reproachfully for disturbing him.

There was a swarm of wasps while we were cooking breakfast in a barn, but nobody cared that much. The children got massive fried breakfasts each morning, and if those cheeky teenage boys got overdone crisp frilly fried eggs, too bad. The washing up consisted of two bowls and a hose pipe somewhere outside in the farmyard. I wish, each time I have a kitchen inspection now by the local council, that I could see those inspectors’ faces if they’d witnessed our washing up arrangements, swilling spaghetti-covered plates around in bowls of cold water.

Your tour guide of hospitals

Continuing with my Which guide of hospitals of the Southeast, and I shall soon be publishing a slim volume. Thank you all by the way for coccyx-related helpful advice. And thank you to AI too. I started to type ‘painful coccyx’ and AI sprung eagerly into action with ‘painful c*ck sex”. So now I'm on some sort of register.

This weekend I visited Thatcham Hospital for small injuries. I was grappling with the lever of the hand-held shower hose thing at the end of the bath, at my brother’s house, which was not cooperating. It suddenly went and I shot across the bathroom and came to rest somewhere between the loo and the towel rail with a floppy left arm. I took myself off to Thatcham the next morning – quite difficult, not going to lie, going from 1^st to 2^nd gear because I’m so old school I still have a manual car. It was nice and early and I saw a lovely paramedic called Leigh. Something broken in the elbow.

There were three unhappy looking Bangladeshi men who explained that their friend was being very sick, they’d rung the ambulance and it hadn’t come. The reception lady explained that they couldn’t deal with sickness and they’d have to ring 111. They duly rang 111 and there followed a long complicated conversation about medical records being accessed from Bangladesh; I didn’t feel that confident, and nor did they, that they would be forthcoming. The poor ill man was beside himself.

When I left the hospital, two ladies, one with crutches, were sitting where the ill man had been. I said to them, maybe move chairs as the man that was sitting here was desperately sick. It’s the sort of conversation that you only have when you’re very old, if I’d had young children with me but they would’ve died of embarrassment at the idea of approaching strangers and telling them to move chairs.

One of the things you can’t do with something broken in the elbow is hang clothes on the washing line, I’ve discovered, wash or dry your hair and definitely not reach anything above shoulder height. Something that keeps popping up on my Instagram (why?) is a clip of a handsome black man, about 8 feet tall, who wanders around in cafés and shops in tight trousers and pearls, smiling beatifically at starstruck middle-aged ladies. Sometimes he reaches up to a high shelf to get something down for a lady shopper. I may have to accept that he’s not going to rock up at Sainsbury’s in Midhurst.

Well, I had a few ideas for what I was going to write about this week but it’s having to be a very short one because I can’t actually sit down to write.

So when I was having that big clear out in the stable and Beano was in there with his clipboard attending to the rodent situation, and the tent was lying on the grass having a nice airing in the sun, covered with grasshoppers who were mysteriously delighted with it, I made huge progress. But the mistake I made was to step backwards to admire my handiwork – never do that – fall off the pallet and go careering backwards into a little deep freeze which was conveniently placed to break my fall, only I feel like it’s broken my coccyx instead. You will all be familiar with the story of Jael who took a tent peg and drove it into Sisera’s head whilst he was sleeping. Perhaps she had her reasons. I know the story not because I am familiar with my Bible but because Bertie Wooster mentions it quite often when he has one of those headaches after a big night in the Drones. It seems to me now as if Jael has driven a tent peg into my bottom. Disappointingly Pommade Divine, which has been a feature of our life since we were introduced to it by our friend Araminta, being the best thing ever for bruises and burns, can have very little effect in this case. Stand down, Mardivine, nothing to see here.

My sister-in-law has always firmly said, ‘we must never say ‘we’ve had a fall’ - that’s the beginning of the end,’ and she has a point. We’re only allowed to say we tripped over. What is annoying is all the decades behind me of falling off horses and doing very little damage. The odd collarbone and broken arm but nothing major, and the Pony Club rule was get up and catch your pony, get straight back on and stop feeling sorry for yourself’. I did once hit my head; I was a bit concussed and although I thought that I had a baby somewhere – Henry aged five months – I had absolutely no idea where he was or who was looking after him. ‘I think the childminder might be called Louise,’ I said to the nurse as the mists cleared. By one of those serendipitous coincidences, a nurse at the hospital used the same childminder and was able to telephone her. So that was lucky, otherwise Henry aged 28 might still be there. After that, I put a little note in my coat pocket saying I have a baby called Henry and he’s with Louise in Duns. Just in case.

So it’s ignominious in the extreme to step off a six-inch pallet and be so grievously wounded. Our father did something the same after a charmed life going through a World War, covering wars and earthquakes in numerous countries, having a stroke whilst up in a helicopter in India and being taken to a field hospital - but what really did him in aged 90 was when he was lugging bags of papers out to the dustbin (what exactly was in those papers, Dad?) tripped over a step and broke his femur very badly. Then when he was in hospital having had the leg pinned, and needed to go down to the ENT department, the hospital porters manhandled him so badly that he broke it again.

A coccyx bruise can apparently take four weeks and if you’ve broken it it might be 8 to 12 weeks but I imagine there’s not much they can do about a broken coccyx anyway. Certainly sitting up in bed reading is no longer an option, nor is sitting on the sofa watching the racing at Goodwood and sitting on a hard dining chair is absolutely out. I’ve tried sitting on sheepskin and in desperation ordered a rubber ring from Amazon. I don’t think I’ve ever been so embarrassed by an Amazon purchase as that rubber ring, but it turns out to be a rubber ring for a mouse to sit on, or perhaps a very small ferret, so that was a waste of time. Any advice gratefully received. Coming up the A34 yesterday there was a prang in the fast lane so it took 45 minutes to cover 5 miles. What with the sun beating down and no air con in my car, the police cars going Nee Naw plus Jael’s tent peg, it seemed like a very long 45 minutes.

But by way of a diversion, as the sun beat down and the police cars squeezed past us, I did listen to a programme on Radio 4 about scams and romantic scams in particular. It featured a lady who had given her online lover, a man she imagined to be a handsome Cuban doctor, about £120,000, fooled by a sophisticated method using deep fakes. They had a scam-busting expert on the programme and he gave a very good tip which is, if you’re on Zoom or FaceTime with a handsome Lothario who urgently needs money from you for his mother’s hip surgery, then ask him to put three fingers up in front of his face, or to ask a colleague to come in and stand beside him. Because that apparently messes up the deep fakery. That's today's top tip.

‘Helping’ in the kitchen

I rather like Pru Leith’s Cotswold Kitchen programme. I love Pru anyway - I was once in a pub in Wiltshire with friends when she and her son Danny Krueger were there because he was doing some Conservative MP thing, when he was still a Conservative. Anyway, they had a very nice Parson Jack Russell terrier which instantly in my mind created a bond. She is very jolly and tells you all sorts of good cooking shortcuts. The other day she was making pasta and for some reason called in her husband John to help her. “I’m making your least favourite food’, she said briskly. So she made it and rolled it out and then John’s job, which he looked less than enthusiastic about, was going to be cutting it into strips to make tagliatelle. He said ‘Do I have a knife?’ which is right up there with unhelpful remarks by husbands when they're doing something under duress. The bubble over his head clearly said ‘women’s work’. It's lucky he wasn't being asked to change a baby’s nappy. I feel that Jael, with her notoriously exacting standards, would've been reaching for her mallet. If I’d been Pru, I might’ve clocked him over the head (this could be why I am single). Of course she gave him the knife she was using, as a good wife would. Come on, John, this is your kitchen, you know where the knife drawer is. I feel there is work to be done before John becomes a New Man.

Sorry but on that note I can't sit up any more. Normal service will be resumed soon.

Because I'm such a shallow watcher of sports, I like the details and the small bits of back history that go with our heroes: Saka thanking God so nicely when things go well on the pitch; Cucurella, the Spanish player with the mophead of curls, doesn't tie his hair back when he plays because it's how his elder son Mateo, who is autistic, recognises him when he's playing. The force of nature that is Erling Haarland has never been a favourite to our family because he plays for Man City but he's so endearing, so sweet with his young fans, such a joker and a hugger, that I'm wavering. And the discipline. ‘Do I want to do this?’ he says when he's being interviewed on (I think) a cross-trainer at the gym. ‘No.’ ‘Will I do it? Yes. I tell my body I’m not tired.’ Love him. I never thought I'd say this, but there are some great role models out there.

cold comfort tv

Not much good new telly in the summer and in between the sport I have been re-watching, don't laugh, The Gilded Age from 2022, written by Julian Fellowes on the back of his Downton success. I love it more than Downton. I'm the only person I've ever met who watches it, so I’m an audience of one and I'm deeply grateful to Julian Fellowes for making it. Just for me, Julian! Thank you so much! So it's America in the 1880s, New York, based mainly around two families - one an Old Money ‘knickerbocker’ family descended from Dutch immigrants, and the other a new brash family who are making money from mines and railroads and build a vulgar new mansion over the street.

Bertha Russell will get herself and her family into society and get past those snooty Vanderbilts and Astors, who are the current society gatekeepers, and she will bag an English duke for her daughter, if it kills her. There's not going to be any such silliness as her daughter’s marrying for love. ‘Happiness as the by-product of a well ordered life may last,’ she says tartly to Gladys. ‘As a goal it is invariably doomed to failure.’

Peggy Scott is a clever young black woman from a relatively wealthy family in Brooklyn, who's a journalist and civil rights trailblazer, whose father was born into slavery and who gets a hell of a shock when she goes south to Alabama on a journalist mission. Julian Fellowes can do the upstairs-downstairs thing in his sleep, so there are plenty of shenanigans with the staff. Loyal staff and sneaky mean staff. Nobody gets the minutiae of the desirability of an English butler over an American one quite like our Julian. Sometimes the families go to their holiday houses in Newport, which is basically the same subtle bitching and jostling for social position but with a bit of tennis thrown in. There are great hats and crazy dresses. Watching it in a heat wave I was especially in awe of those women who could walk around with bustles like that attached to their behinds. How did they sit? Climb stairs? Did they have to have special chairs? Quite honestly with those corsets they deserved to rule the world. Anyway, I love it and it’s comfort viewing, and sometimes it makes me cry, than which there can be no greater compliment.

squeaky green

When I wrote last week about the hospital in Glasgow where the cleaners were being offered additional support for their having cleaned the floors with toxic dishwasher fluid, it hadn't occurred to me that the algorithm, who never sleeps or even nods off in an armchair watching the weather forecast, would pick it up so quickly. The same day I was inundated on Instagram with adverts for pure, green, planet friendly dishwasher tablets. No plastic, fish friendly, so pure you could probably wash the floors with it in a Glasgow hospital - there’s Ocean Saver, Mother Earth, smol, Bio D, Kit & Kin - Lord, it's another minefield out there. Anybody got any ideas about which of them work? Meanwhile, I'm going to do as Nancy Birtwhistle told me and make my own. So I've just bought some sodium percarbonate, if you please, which she always refers to as green bleach. Queen Nancy even makes detergent out of ivy leaves. I think I'm going to start off gently with sodium percarbonate as my starter drug, and may move onto ivy leaves later. I'll let you know how I get on with my mixture.

London-based firm goes missing

I wanted to get a present for my son Henry; in particular I wanted to buy him a waistcoat to wear with his morning coat, which as is his his custom, came from a charity shop. I didn't think he’d totally approve of a spanking new piece of clothing but I came across a firm called Babble & Hemp. A hemp waistcoat! I thought, that will be nice and cool and perhaps a bit more sustainable than silk - hemp uses far less water in its manufacture than cotton, so let's go for that. There's a nice looking chap on the website talking about how he travelled to Uzbekistan when he was at university and witnessed the degradation caused by the fashion industry, and cotton in particular, to the Aral Sea, which started his journey into sustainability. Charming. What could be better? I signed on the dotted line and ordered a lovely gents’ waistcoat. I did think the sizes were a bit odd; Henry needed a 40 but there was only a 41 so we went for that. About five seconds after I ordered it I realised I meant to put his address for delivery, not mine, and rang customer services, no reply so I left a message saying please change the delivery address.

The parcel duly arrived at the wrong address (mine) so I sent it on to him. It is too big and needs changing, but can I get hold of those people? Can I heck? They have vanished off the face of the earth: that apparently decent boy never seems to pick up his phone and the customer service ‘team’ whom he jokily refers to as ‘probably off having a cup of tea or ironing shirts’ - are no doubt a figment of his imagination. Babble & Hemp, London, it says on the website. Yeah, yeah. Well, they saw me coming. I shall have to alter the waistcoat myself, but perhaps that will appeal to Henry's slow fashion sensibilities.

The Times ran a piece this week boldly called Why the UK is falling back in love with Jack Russells over Crossbreeds (some of us never fell out of love with them) and several incensed readers took to the comments sections below to express their profound disagreement and their visceral hatred for ‘small yappy aggressive dogs’. It’s possible they’re cat people: I feel that Beano and I might have come across some of those readers on our walks. They have clearly been unlucky in the Jack Russells that they have met but still ‘If you cannot think of anything appropriate to say, you will please restrict your remarks to the weather’ as Mrs. Dashwood said to her daughter Margaret.

According to the Times piece, people looking to buy a dog are turning away from so-called designer puppies and dogs which may well have veterinary issues such as flat faces or breathing difficulties, (we seem to have reached peak French bulldog) in favour of the robust long-living terrier. Although the piece does warn that they’re not necessarily a pet for the faint hearted; what they politely refer to as their ‘strong prey drive’ making them not exactly a pushover and quite hard to train. I would like to apologise here and now to my friends who have cats.

As a family we’ve had many different dogs over the years: terriers, Yorkshire terriers, Shetland sheepdogs, Border collies, Hungarian Viszlas, Labradors, Foxhounds… what I particularly like about terriers is their eternal busyness and curiosity. If a terrier was a boy he would not be hunched over his phone, that's for sure; he’d be up a tree, in a stream, making a camp, getting filthy and forgetting to come home for lunch. A terrier is never knowingly bored and if there's nothing to chase, they're quite happy to be with us in the car and joining in with whatever we're doing. When as a child my family started preparations for going to Thorpeness, the terriers climbed into the car at least three days before we left.

I had a slightly grim job this week because my neighbours are going to borrow our great big tent for their party and that was a good excuse to pull it out, between us, and lay it out on the grass since there's no rain forecast until about 2028, for a nice airing. There are a few mouse holes in it but not too many. Having done that, it seemed a good idea to pull things out of the stable where I store other abandoned junk and go to the tip, sweep the floor and generally have a blitz. I practically have my own car parking space at the council tip now. (How nice and helpful are the men there?) This is the sort of job that really appeals to a terrier: Beano spent all day in the stable, whether I was there or not, his nose jammed to the holes in the brick floor or trying to climb up the wall to reach the eaves. The one time a mouse obligingly ran out from under a pallet he missed it.

They are just very good company. If I'm digging in the garden, he's digging; if I'm looking in the hedge for bantam eggs, he's looking too. When I sleep, he sleeps. I don't know why he barks at the postman because I never do that.

Those of us who have had Jack Russells know, or think we know, that it all started with Parson John Russell (b 1795) from Devon, who started breeding terriers when he was still at Exeter College, Oxford, and crossed a bitch called Trump, whom he had apparently bought from the milkman, with fox terriers. His aim was to breed a narrow-chested small terrier that would go to earth and bolt the fox out. He did not want a dog who would kill a fox. I like the sound of Parson Jack: he was very tall, kind and affable, a famously good horseman and huntsman. He was intent on breeding a good working dog and always refused invitations to judge at dog shows, with one exception when he judged at Crystal Palace in 1874, although he said afterwards that the terriers he saw failed to impress him.

He apparently said ‘A fox-terrier is not required to draw badgers, nor should be such a hard biter as to slaughter a fox in his earth. The bull blood would in all probability produce this impetuosity, and destroy the gentlemanly character of the strain entirely.’

It was Arthur Blake Heinemann, who founded the Devon and Somerset Badger Club and was breeding terriers in the 1890s, after the Parson had died, who appears to have introduced the bull terrier strain into the breed and thus some strength and aggression: producing ‘hard’ terriers, which had never been the Parson’s aim. The Parson’s terriers, never more than 15 lb in weight and often considerably less, were fox botherers but not killers; Heinemann’s shorter-legged and broader-chested dogs were probably closer to the Jack Russells we know today.

So going back to the comments under the Times piece, the yappy bitey aggressive little dogs so detested by those unlucky readers, in all probability owe more to Heinemann than to Parson John Russell.

My mother found her first rough-coated Jack Russell terrier puppy in the 1920s and called him Cribb after the famous bare-knuckle boxer. He was the first of a line of 13 generations that she had; I have to say that there was never one of them who was a biter or remotely aggressive although they were tremendous hunters and spent as much time underground as possible. Once when my siblings and I were in charge and our parents were in Wales, we took the dogs for a walk on a Sunday and they promptly went underground in a massive hillside riddled with thrilling holes and fox earths. Our parents came home on Wednesday and my mother went straight out and told them to leave what they were doing and come out NOW. They were filthy and hungry but they’d had the time of their lives.

My first terrier came from a working strain in the Borders of Scotland and he was a very tiny and smooth coated, called Tadpole. One night in the stables somebody left the big galvanised bin of oats with the lid open and in the morning there were a couple of rats in there, stuffed with oats and unable to jump out; Tadpole by then had a bit of a reputation as a ruthless ratter so we put him in and he dealt with them in seconds. The Parson would have been horrified.

Years later when I was living with my father in Kent, I was due to go to London for the day. At breakfast Tadpole put his front paws on my knee and gazed searchingly at me. ‘You’re the dearest sweetest most loyalist little dog in the world,’ I said to him. He replied - well we don’t know what he replied because he was a dog, don’t be silly, but to this day I feel that he was saying goodbye. (In all probability he was saying, do you need that tiny bit of toast left on your plate?) When I came back from London that evening and said to Dad’s carer ‘Where’s Tadpole?’ she said, Oh I thought he’d gone with you. That was it and we never saw him again; we searched and put up posters and a strange woman rang me and said she'd had him but lost him again, but she gave me a false name and address. I still wonder.

I went regularly to the local dog pound but there was no sign. After a while they asked if I’d be interested in adopting one of the terriers they had and that’s how we found Trumpet, who was fluffy and long legged, about four months old and here I think the ghost of Parson Jack Russell would be nodding approvingly because Trumpet was much more his sort of terrier and turned out to be a perfect little gentleman.

My father was by then not able to go to London to his office at the Telegraph, but he had constant visitors who came down to Kent to see him; somebody had given him a case of half-bottles of champagne and Dad considered that a glass of champagne was just the thing to offer a visitor mid-morning rather than a cup of coffee. One of these visitors had a driver who was very taken with Trumpet, then quite newly adopted. ‘He’s a Parson’ he said, ‘I used to breed them.’ It was he who told me that Parsons were bred back to fox terriers (and, he thought, beagles) whereas the small wider-chested, piano-legged smooth coated terriers were bred back to bull terriers, hence the differences in temperament.

When the Times says that the UK is falling back in love with Jack Russells, I think they mean to say, not quite everyone.

why do we need those chemicals?

A curious story from a hospital in Glasgow where cleaners are being offered ‘occupational health support’ when it transpired that a toxic dishwasher fluid has been used for cleaning the floors for the last three years. The alarm has been raised because it seems that cleaners at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital (QEUH) have been sloshing it onto the floors, including on wards containing vulnerable patients. ‘This is a dangerous liquid full of powerful chemicals and only meant to be used with the greatest of care’, said a source. The product is called Suma Linos L6.8L. What I want to know is, if this fluid is so toxic is it really a great idea to be using it in dishwashers? What if it doesn’t rinse off properly? And what’s wrong with hot water and soap? Are we saying that kitchen staff are more meticulous and careful than general cleaning staff because over the years of working in hospitals and care homes that’s not been my experience. They’d be better off using the floor cleaner advised by our friend the excellent Nancy Birtwhistle: ‘200ml white vinegar, 50ml eco-friendly washing up liquid, and warm water (up to 500ml). For a fresh scent, you can add a few drops of your favourite essential oil, such as lemongrass or peppermint.’ Much better and safer for everyone.

And here’s a tip for you in this hot weather, also from Nancy. I don’t like to be personal but flies can be a problem around your dustbins, no? I always feel sorry for the men that empty the bins and mine are completely charming, and particularly at this time of year when let’s not beat about the bush, there can be maggots. I have tried most things and usually spray the bin inside and out and each bag as it goes in with Jeyes fluid but it smells like public loos and doesn’t seem to entirely cope with the flies. But I just discovered this week that salt is the answer. Cheap table salt liberally scattered inside your black bin and on the bags. It works.

Over the years I have heard people say, with perhaps a little rancour, of their rich and successful contemporaries, but he’s so thick! He only went to X school! He only got one O level! (How dare he do so well).

It gets under their skin, the cool hares who excelled at school, the ones who were always in the cricket XI and thus made a huge fuss of by everyone, when those dorky tortoises somehow slip past them and make a fortune. Perhaps the tortoises had to try harder in their early lives, because they weren’t automatically charismatic; maybe they have had to make more effort to read the room. Maybe their parents set them a good example in treating people well. I suspect they are just good with people. Of course there are people who succeed by being brilliant and difficult. But I bet there are more who succeed because they treat people well, delegate well and trust people.

This week at a lunch I overheard a 12 year-old girl being rude and offhand to a woman who was for various reasons vulnerable. One of the ladies instantly took her to task for her bad manners and told her mother, and the child later came in and said Sorry. Brave woman, I thought, not many people would dare to criticise somebody else’s child, and well done the mother for backing her up and the girl for apologising. Out of little acorns etc.

There are many quotations attributed to various people on the lines of: there is no such thing as a failure of talent, only of character. One of Heraclitus’ maxims was ‘character is fate’. And in the end character does tell, far more than wealthy or pushy parents or good grades. Literature loves an anti-hero like Heathcliff or Scarlett O’Hara, angry Achilles or the outcast policeman or doctor who rage against the world, fuelled by their anger; they make enemies like shelling peas but their flawed brilliance wins out in the end. But I’m not so sure that their method works that well in real life. I think there are painstaking and persevering people who can read the room, make unlikely friends, remain calm and succeed that way. Anger is toxic fuel and we’re all better off without it. Prince Harry lost his mother and that understandably changed his life forever, poor little boy, but if only he could let go of some of the anger. He seems bent on revenge and retribution and one can’t help thinking that perhaps a gentler more level-headed wife might have helped him with that.

And in sport too. John McEnroe was entertaining with his tantrums, but I’m not sure how much good it really did him and his parents must’ve suffered hideously. (Mind you, look what a lovely man he is now.) One of the many appealing characteristics of our brand-new hero Arthur Fery is his equable temperament. He seems like a lovely calm boy who is delighted to be where he is, modest and happy in his own skin; he just gets on with the job. It’s an odd thing with sporting heroes, and I’m particularly thinking of Wimbledon heroes this week. Somebody appears who we’ve hardly ever heard of and they give us a surprise result and within a few days they’re our best friend, it’s Arthur this and Arthur that and we know where he went to school and how much his father is worth. How we love him! And we've only known him for five minutes. Particularly, obviously, because I’m writing from the UK, we take a new British sporting hero to our bosoms because they’ve been quite thin on the ground lately.

Because we do need our heroes. It’s been a great month for sport. Occasionally it worries me how much people idolise their football teams and how devastated they are when it loses - it means that people literally lose their minds over a hair’s-breadth decision or missed penalty. Can it be healthy to put so much weight on something over which you have absolutely no control? but then when it goes our way, it’s a great unifying experience. Sorry to be boring but the England match against Mexico was tremendous in so many ways; it did, without a hint of irony, make one proud to be British. What with the various impediments both physical and emotional, plus having 20% less oxygen available to them and only 10 men, they were magnificent. There is something about a combined team effort that is especially wonderful - obviously not all sports are team sports and individual athletes have their own battles and successes, but there is something glorious about the chemistry of a team. At 4 am when it was all over, I walked the dog in the dawn and got the fright of my life to see a new creepy white scarecrow thing flapping about in the field supposedly scaring the pigeons off the broccoli. I don’t know about the pigeons but it scared the pants off me.

Then of course you sometimes forget - when there has been some big sporting excitement - that not everybody cares. I went to a drinks party after the Fery match (well done Arthur for getting it done in 3 sets) and they were mostly people I didn’t know. Well, I thought I’m one of the boys now; I can talk about sport. Were you just watching the tennis? I said to a man. ‘No!’ he said repressively. ‘and not the football either.’ Fair enough, but actually it was a bit annoying because he said it as if it were a particular badge of honour: sport was absolutely beneath him. (Little friendly tip here, people: if you are going to close down somebody else’s conversational efforts, maybe then introduce a little motif of your own? Like, oh I don’t know, Nigel Farage and Count Binface or something like that?) It’s a bit like when you ask somebody if they’ve seen a particular drama or programme and they say, ‘I don’t watch television’ which puts me firmly in my place. I did ask another man if he’d been watching the tennis and he looked at me as if I were bonkers and said ‘No’ so that seemed to be that for my conversational efforts.

Nil Points

The chickens are a little confused by the hot weather and the short nights. They have an automatic door-closer, but I have to keep changing the timer as bedtime gets later and later and they dilly-dally about in the gloaming and risk getting shut out. While it’s been hot, I’ve been opening the main door of the house as well during the day to get a through-draught because there are two obstinately broody hens – Miss Bates and Mrs Rochester - who sit in the nest box all day long until I lift them out and make them go and have a drink.

But last night when I went out at bedtime the trap door had shut at nine and the two Miss Bennets and Lady Catherine de Bourgh were standing patiently outside it, as if they were waiting outside the village hall for a jumble sale. Absolutely no initiative. Don’t be silly, I said, the big door is open, go round the back. They gave me the sort of look that the man at the drinks party gave me when I asked him about sport. I ushered them round the back, with the all-too willing assistance of Beano who loves it when he thinks the chickens are in trouble, longing for the chance to get stuck in and have a tiny little nip at their tail feathers.

Look, I said, this great big door is wide open. Why don’t you go in there? They shuffled about as if it was a trick, looking at each other nervously. Eventually Lady Catherine took a few brave steps and tiptoed into the house. Elizabeth and Mary Bennet, not a chance. I had to open the trap door and let them in that way.

It reminded me that years ago when I had a series of quite odd cooking jobs, I worked for a while in the canteen of the Post Office in Oxford. This was not in any sense haute cuisine, you understand. Chips featured quite largely and there was a man whose sole job was peeling and slicing potatoes. One day the man whose only task was to make the custard – and custard had an important role, almost as important as chips – didn’t appear at work. Why don’t I make

the custard? I suggested. To a man, they looked at me incredulously. The custard was made by the custard man, and if somebody else made it, the sky would probably fall in.

Anyway, nil points to the Misses Bennet.

A fabulous story on the front page of the online Telegraph this morning, so good in fact that they put it on the page twice. That’s obviously a joke, I thought, abandoning it to read instead about Pakistan’s refusing to take back the ringleader of the Rochdale rapists’ gang, on the (admittedly legitimate) basis that he would be a danger to Pakistani children.

Hang on, actually, let’s go back a moment, what was that about paying people to walk? So this exciting new initiative is the idea of Sir Brendan Foster, Olympic medallist: he has come up with an absolute belter of an idea which is to encourage people to walk for 20 minutes a day in return for vouchers. It’s going to have the inspirational title of ‘a marathon a month’, on the basis that 20 minutes a day equates to 26 miles in one month. Inevitably, the results need to be logged on a smartphone or watch, which probably excludes many of the people for whom a brisk daily walk would be such a boon. I’m not sure how this is to be policed, because let’s face it everything of this ilk is going to need checking up on. Look, I appreciate that the government have a hell of a problem with the NHS on its hands and knees with exhaustion, but I think with this idea we may be straying into the Richard Littlejohn you-couldn’t-make-it-up territory.

Quite apart from anything else, NHS – er, pot and kettle? ‘And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?’ as St Matthew so snappily put it. I’ve spent more time in hospitals than one would really wish over the last 13 years and when a doctor friend used to come sometimes to keep me company during treatment, he would cover his face with his hands in despair at the size and BMI of the nursing staff who were huffing and puffing about the wards. When advertising for new nursing staff in his practice, he was tempted to put in a narrow turnstyle.

So I think it would be a great idea if the NHS considered the salad-dodgers in their own ranks before trying to bribe the public with sugary snacks in order to get them to walk more. This genius new initiative will use techniques such as those used by Duolingo, to encourage people in their efforts, which presumably means more time spent on their phones, not less, whilst some impertinent little emoji sends you frowny messages telling you to get off your backside or you’ll lose your streak. The scheme will take inspiration from some health companies who offer free cinema tickets or cups of coffee. Going to the cinema with, let's face it, a bucket of popcorn, is just the motivation we need to make us walk more.

As the Telegraph readers so robustly put it in the comments under their piece, quite apart from the general ludicrousness of the idea, it’s always possible that people will put the smartwatch on the dog in order to claim their free doughnut. (They have suspicious minds, those Telegraph readers.)

Mind you, a dog might be a good start. Our sedentary lifestyle and inability to get off our bottoms is apparently costing the NHS around £1 billion a year. It seems that around half of middle-aged people can only manage one brisk 10 minute walk a month. Ten minutes! Per month! I want to know what the emergency was that caused them to break the habit of a lifetime and have a 10 minute walk in the first place. Dashing back to the hospital car park, perhaps, before the payment ran out, because the grumbles you hear most in hospital are not about their health or their treatment or even the government, but concern the iniquity of their having to pay £3 to park their car whilst receiving a free MRI scan which if done privately would cost them up to £1,500.

I know I know, people have bad genes or big bones or whatever and I was very lucky in my family that particularly on my mother’s side they were all athletes or runners or tennis players who had ants in their pants and couldn't sit still for a moment. My cousin Bruce Tulloh was a brilliantly competitive runner and coach who famously always ran barefoot back in the 60s and ran across America (2,876 miles) in 65 days, averaging 45 miles a day (but wearing shoes).

My mother would walk for miles: even when she was painfully bent after a failed back operation she had a wheelie pusher that she could sit on for the occasional rest, with a motley pack of dogs, latterly a collie, a Jack Russell and Yorkshire terrier. As children we seem to walk everywhere; a little ragtag group of us with one maybe on a pony, one sister leading her goat and a ranging pack of independent-minded Jack Russells. My older sister was a nurse in the state of Virginia and like to walk everywhere she could. In the USA, where everybody gets in their car to travel 100 yards, this was considered eccentric to the point of madness.

I hesitate to recommend that these unwilling walkers get a dog because it seems unfair on the dog. A ten minute walk once a month isn’t really going to cut it for a busy dog. But if they do decide to get a dog, and obviously there are multiple joys that come with owning a dog, not just the exercise, then I think there may need to be some ground rules first.

· Keep your phone in your pocket. If you’re ambling along on your phone at a snail’s pace then that’s not going to do anything for your health.

· If you bring a ball launcher, then you are missing the point.

· Don’t put a coat on the poor dog, preferably ever because they don’t need them. But if you insist and it’s a whippet and a freezing cold day then maybe.

· Don’t deny your dog a walk just because it’s raining. They honestly don’t mind.

· It’s unlikely that these reluctant walkers or those who are needing to be bribed with cups of coffee by the NHS, will be tempted to start running. But if you are running with a dog, it always seems a bit mean that it doesn’t get a chance for a sniff or a rootle round in the hedge. I feel sorry for dogs that are being dragged along on leads and missing the minute and detailed inspection that they would otherwise have made of that particular thistle. Sniffing is a vitally important part of a dog’s walk, otherwise how do they find out who’s been there before? It’s their Instagram.

And obviously, for optimum results for your health then you need to walk the sort of dog that may momentarily forget itself when in the vicinity of wildlife or farm livestock. Those headlong dashes over parks and across fields as we pursue our dogs during those Fenton-like moments are what spikes our blood pressure and our adrenalin levels so satisfactorily and will raise the healthy sweat so admired by our health practitioners. You will burn calories, your body will flood with serotonin and your mental health, during those euphoric moments when you have finally caught your dog, will be in tiptop condition. As well as these benefits, apologising for your dog’s behaviour or engaging fellow walkers in friendly conversation to distract them from the dirty footprints on their white jeans, is marvellous practice for your social skills.

So look out for a rewards-based system coming to a surgery near you. Sir Brendan quite rightly reminds us that historically we jolly well had to move. ‘If you didn’t hunt, somebody else got your food. If you didn’t move, somebody might catch you as their food. Movement wasn’t optional.’ So perhaps all those wildlife campaigners who want to see bears and wolves and lynx released back into the British countryside might have a point. If there were bears swaggering about all over the place then perhaps we would begin to move really quite briskly. Final word to Brendan. ‘The scientists have done an amazing job uncovering the benefits of movement.’ Indeed. Well done them.

I mostly watch jump racing through my fingers, and Beano can’t watch it at all because if there’s a faller and I gasp, he thinks he’s done something wrong and retires upstairs in a sulk. But I’m a huge fan of the Irish National Hunt jockey Danny Mullins, for many reasons and not least because he has magnificent hair. But one of the things I really approve of is that he has a tiny weeny little dog called Mila; apparently she’s a Russian toy terrier. Real men have little dogs, in my view. Maybe some of those drug dealers in Brixton who parade about with those poor grunting slavering bully-type dogs that are never allowed to come off their chain leads, could get themselves a nice little dog instead. It would be so much more manly.

A strange little glass jug appeared in the kitchen in Sardinia, full of something clear and crimson. Was it something for our cocktails, always a possibility, Negroni maybe? No, it was definitely oily. It transpired that it was Hypericum oil (St John’s wort; it flowers around the time of the feast of Saint John which falls this week), infused by Pietro the masseur and used for his massages: he left the unused oil for us.

It seems that the uses and benefits of hypericum are manifold – as a mild antidepressant, for skin healing, for the symptoms of menopause. It’s been studied for its effects on ADHD, IBS, OCD, and as an aid for giving up smoking, though it interacts badly with many prescription medicines. Powerful stuff: I bet those mediaeval witches were all over it. Pietro comes to do massages whenever there is a houseful, a loud and cheerful person who drives at speed from halfway up the island to visit the house, gives life enhancing massages to everyone for an hour each and then, fuelled with only a small cup of black coffee, speeds off home again to the elderly mother with whom he lives. Sardinian culture, in common with many (but not ours in the UK) cherishes their old people.

Many years ago when I lived in the borders of Scotland, I used to go up to Murrayfield for physiotherapy with Stuart, who was then the physio for the Scottish rugby squad. In those days I was doing a lot of both riding and falling off horses. On my first visit, standing upright but stripped down to my underwear, he walked round me for a preliminary inspection of my slightly battered body and said ‘Have you played much rugby?’

Discipline: how dare she?

I’m always interested in a piece about Katherine Birbalsingh, the founder and headteacher of Michaela school. She’s one of those people that arouses admiration in many quarters and an almost religious antipathy in others. Alice Thompson, who wrote the Times piece, admits that she was originally not a fan but has been converted. If you can get past the paywall, read the piece HERE.

The school itself is an unpromising former office block in Brent: there are no sports facilities or green acres of cricket pitches. Eton it isn’t. If you mentioned Michaela school to Bridget Phillipson, the government’s education secretary, steam would come out of her head and she would very likely self-combust like Krook in Bleak House. You’d think it would be right up Bridget’s street, a non-selective state secondary in a deprived area of London, consistently out-performing many fee-paying schools.

Katharine Birbalsingh is a punchy and sometimes antagonistic headmistress but by improving discipline she has freed up her teachers to actually teach, and not to spend half the lesson sorting out recalcitrant pupils. Is walking in silence between lessons honestly such a bad thing? (the corridors are where the bullying happens in many schools). Then there is her insistence that students don’t get a free pass because of their circumstances: don’t patronise children from deprived areas or with challenging family situations, she says, that’s just stoking victimhood. ‘Who are we to lower expectations for these children and say they can’t make it?’ She expects the best from them, and no excuses, but what seems to cause the most worried head-shaking among her critics is that there is Shakespeare at Michaela but no phones.

You can always open the car windows

So where were you during the last heat wave? By which I mean the 1976 one. I can’t actually remember a lot about the actual heat but I know that I was living with my boyfriend (later husband) in a cottage on the Blenheim Palace estate in Oxfordshire. And that area was in a slight dip and a frost pocket – there’d be snow on the ground in that wood when the rest of the country was bathing in springtime – so in hindsight it was probably quite a good place to be in a heat wave in an era where we didn’t bother much with suncream or hats. Crispin was a student at Oxford and I was at a secretarial College, commuting into Oxford on my little moped. We lived with another friend called Simon in a keeper’s cottage right in the centre of the woods, where pheasants meandered about and a hedgehog used to walk right into the kitchen looking for crumbs – a bit like in Charles Dickens’s house. Every night at dusk the woodcock used to do their jinking flight down the central avenue of the wood.

The woods were patrolled by a gamekeeper who would for some reason push his bicycle along the paths but ride it across ploughed fields. He had dark suspicions – not without reason –that the odd pheasant found its way into our oven. I also remember – times must’ve been very hard – digging up some potatoes from one of the estate fields. Another time we picked some apparently OK mushrooms in the woods and decided to cook them for friends for supper. Obviously we took the sensible precaution of eating some for tea first, on toast, so that we wouldn’t poison our guests.

It was a fairly unusual tenancy. Our landlord Jamie used to appear with some friends in that dull moment between their shooting tea and changing for dinner, and poke fun at our having boiled eggs for supper. Another time when we were away for the weekend, Jamie couldn’t find his gun and his father was shouting at him so he broke a window in our cottage, climbed in and took my boyfriend’s gun from its impenetrable hiding place under the bed. The boys used to shoot rabbits at night in the park and sell them in the covered market in Oxford, for as far as I can remember the not very princely sum of 40p per rabbit and 80p for a hare. In the heatwave summer, something went wrong with the copper rod earthing the house and we got an electric shock every time we touched the cooker or the bath or anything metal. And air con was still a long way in the future, for us anyway. Air con was for sissies.

In ancient Sardinian folklore the accabadora is a woman dressed in black who slips through the streets, walking with a cane which creepily doubles up as a mallet. She goes to a prearranged address – the doors have left open for her by the family- and there in the bedroom lies somebody who is sick and ready for death. The priest has been, their soul has been made ready and the accabadora comes to help them on their way. History doesn't relate what the patient thought about the arrangement, and of necessity it was all happening, in a highly Catholic country, in the greatest of secrecy. She turns the holy statues to face the wall so they will not witness the act, and delivers a ‘good death’.

Just one of the stories about this ancient place which has seen so many civilisations come and go - Phoenicians, Carthaginians and Romans (‘what did the Romans ever do for us?’). If if you've forgotten that or would like to watch it again, that Monty Python sketch is HERE. Because the island is relatively isolated, the inhabitants’ DNA is the closest to the ancient neolithic farmers of anywhere in Europe. The Nuraghic people built more than 7,000 nuraghi – squat cone-like buildings of basalt blocks dug from extinct volcanoes and put together without any mortar; a sort of massive dry-stone beehive – between 1500 and 400 BCE. And there they still are. It’s beyond comprehension that they have lasted so long. They were up to maybe 10 metres tall: a circular building with rooms, corridors and terraces. Nobody really knows if they were houses, temples or what but those builders need a pat on the back because they’ve lasted far longer than a Wimpey house from the 1960s.

In 1974 a farmer busy ploughing his fields near Cabras in central Sardinia had a bit of a lucky find and unearthed the first of many stone fragments. The Giants of Mont’e Prama are life-size stone statues from the Nuraghic civilisation, dating from perhaps 900–750 BCE. Scientist have pieced together about 5000 fragments, like some colossal monolithic jigsaw, to recreate stone warriors and boxers with strange otherworldly faces. It seems that these gigantic figures - with their strange angular faces, triangular noses and concentric circle eyes like the snake in Jungle Book - were made to guard the tombs. Those guys are almost 3,000 years old! and they literally could have been made by Modigliani, but he died in 1920, long before they were discovered.

Then we fast forward to the 1950s when the Aga Khan first visited the rocky inhospitable Northern coast of the Island and thought Hello! No self-respecting posho would’ve dreamt of holidaying in Sardinia in those days; the reassuringly expensive places to go in those days, where you could be confident of finding your friends, were places like Nice, Cannes and Biarritz. The Aga Khan formed a consortium in 1962 to buy some 1800 hectares of land – their resolutions were firstly a proper respect for nature and place, and secondly the future. He brought in some of the most respected architects of the day –- Luigi Vietti, Jacques Couëlle, Michele Busiri Vici and Antonio Simon Mossa. They built the yacht club and hey presto; the punters came flocking in and the Costa Smeralda was born. Then, not so good and drawn to the smell of money like sharks, came the mafia and some brutal kidnappings.

A place where you go on holiday for maybe two weeks of the year creates a special and unique section of memories in your mind. Perhaps because you are there for such a fleeting time you absorb it all: it becomes part of your treasured mind map. To this day, if I can’t sleep, instead of counting sheep I walk around the house that we had most often in Thorpeness in Suffolk when I was a child, just across the road from the sea where we had our bracing regular swims. It was the law that at the very least we swam before lunch. I can wander around the old house in my mind and literally feel gritty sand on the wooden steps up from the beach to the veranda, take a tour round the sitting room with its dark brown post-war utility furniture. Those places become so ingrained that you could walk round them blindfolded. I can feel the lino under my feet on the upstairs landing and the step down into the bathroom, and remember the cosy feeling of lying in bed with the sea pounding on the shingle.

And it’s the same here. The house was built one room after another, so the bedrooms are in separate buildings along the path down from the main house. When I go to the kitchen for a cup of tea, sometimes at 6 am, today at the idiotic time of 3am, I use a torch so I don’t wake anybody but in reality I know every stone on that path, including the big round one like a fossilised molehill that I am likely to trip over since I tend to trip over pretty much everything else. At 3am today the Scops owl and I had the place to ourselves; it was a thrill to hear it because I don’t think I’ve ever heard one in England. You don’t hear too many birds here when it’s hot: just the owls, the nightjars, the cicadas and the occasional rustling grunting in the bushes where the wild boar truffle around looking for scraps.

There’s a lot goes on beneath the surface in a house like this whose owners live in England and which is occasionally let during the high summer weeks. We can come and bask in the weather and flop about in the pool or on the boat, but there’s an awful lot of upkeep going on behind the scenes.

St François, who acts as chef butler footman housekeeper boatman batman like the most obliging Mary Poppins/Jeeves figure ever, gets to know the guests so well that he knows what they want before they do. He deals with the pool maintenance, the shopping, the airport runs, the car, the boat licences. He, with Rick, has mastered the Mensa-level requirements for working out the rubbish disposal rota, the Wi-Fi problems, the water glitches.

The water crisis last year involved the exciting adventures of the water diviner who was, in true Sardinian style, about 110 years old and performed a spirited dance with his plumb line, muttering and hopping with exaggerated steps as if he were trying to catch a recalcitrant chicken. That episode ended well and the new bore hole was duly dug, 131 metres deep. François roars off to get the boat ready and washes it down after we’ve been out, and then rushes back on the motorbike to cook our dinner. He’s trying to give up smoking at present and not entirely winning, and frankly I don’t blame him. He’s like a Duracell bunny in Toms and never relaxes for a second. Truly a prince among men.

A holiday is all about the people isn’t it? You can go to the swankiest place in the world and have the most spoiling time ever but if people are unrelaxing or demanding then it’s no holiday at all. And conversely you meet somebody you didn't previously know that well in a holiday house party, and get to know them extremely well in a matter of days. Nothing more bonding than an inadvertent glimpse of somebody's bottom on a boat. This year there’s the added joy for me of Drum’s coming from Dubai to spend the week with us here.

Years ago when I first came here, it was with a boyfriend and our hosts had said: do use the house in Sardinia. Just turn up - it’s not locked. We did and it wasn’t. That is how extraordinarily generous they are. These days most young couples go on holiday together long before they get married; back in the day living with somebody for the first time must have been a true revelation. What it taught me about this boyfriend was that he was pathologically incapable of being on time for anything.

Some of the beaches in Sardinia are having to take steps because of the massive invasion of summer tourists, and they’re clamping down on allowing beach towels on the sand. Beachgoers will be fined if they don’t first put down a beach mat under their towel because otherwise a wet towel might carry away too much sand from the beach. That sounds sensible and apart from anything else if you did try to travel home with a whole lot of sand in your suitcase, good luck with getting that past the easyJet boarding gate dragons.

Hurrah! Off to Sardinia at the weekend but there are a few hurdles to be navigated first. Not who has the dog because that is sorted, although I have a heavy burden of guilt in my heart. Beano, never slow to turn a crisis into a drama, will shriek piteously after my departing car and I will cry all the way home. Not the chickens because my kind neighbours will look after them and be rewarded with two diminutive eggs a day. No, the biggest hurdle of all is the packing and then running the gauntlet of those hard-boiled EasyJet ladies.

We never check in baggage when we go to Sardinia: there’s no particular reason, it’s just that if you check a suitcase, you’re a great big sissy and waiting for the baggage at Olbia airport will add approximately seven minutes to the journey time. So it’s the laughably small suitcase again and my loft is full of previously acceptable, now unacceptable, cases for EasyJet holidays. Remember those halcyon days when you just got a vaguely OK black bag on wheels, plus a handbag and maybe even a carrier bag with duty-free bottles and slung it all in the overhead locker? Well, as some of you will know, the size of a free bag on EasyJet is now 45 x 36 x 20cm, roughly the size of your pencil case if you don’t have too many felt tips.

So the annual challenge is getting a week’s worth of clothes into the pencil case. And the newspapers are full of particularly unhelpful articles with tips for packing, tips for what to wear on holiday for the over-50s (rude), what the fashion editors are packing this summer, the 5-4-3-2-1 rule… let’s not even go there. They don't tell you what to wear when it's very hot and you're sitting swearing at the sewing machine with heavy curtains draped across your lap. Apparently a silk eye mask is an absolute must: don’t travel without it. Are you mad, Fashion Editor, or have you never flown on EasyJet? A silk eye mask takes up valuable space which if freed up will permit you to take at least two more pairs of knickers. Although one thing the silk eye mask has in its favour is that you could wear it round your neck while you're travelling, which even I probably won't be doing with my knickers.

And the Gorgons will spot any sort of handbag you might try and conceal about your person - don’t imagine for one moment that you can get away with a (horrible word) tote bag with stuff you need for the journey, or a (another horrible word) cross-body bag of the sort that made my aunt shudder - as well as your miniature suitcase. No, no: every SINGLE thing has got to fit in that dolly-size suitcase. So a book is out of the question, too heavy, it’s a Kindle or nothing. Which is a pity as Dennis, by way of an apology for his dreadful behaviour last weekend, has thrillingly sent me a copy of Land, the new Maggie O'Farrell, but that will not be coming with me. Certainly there’s no space for a hairdryer; round about this time I start to think: do I really need a hairbrush for just one week? (it’s weird nobody has ever asked me to be a a Fashion Editor).

The one new thing I have bought for the summer, thank you for asking, is a sleeveless black shift from Cos, with pockets. A handy day dress, I thought, avoiding the siren call of the white one for practical reasons. Ooops, I now learn that Evri will be delivering it, so perhaps not this summer then.

Ideally, of course, one would travel with Monty Don. Or failing that with his useful linen utility jacket and all those big pockets. I could fit Dennis's book in one pocket. and very probably Dennis in the other since I feel he would enjoy a crack at those wild boar in Sardinia. It might cure him of his passion for wildlife.

Readers with a good memory will recall that I took as a present for my hosts last year some pillowcases which I made at home then had a lady with a swanky embroidery machine embroider them with the house name and a dear little wild boar. But the thing was that I managed to misspell the house name which is hideously embarrassing as I had by then been doing Duolingo Italian for a year and should’ve known better. I could only play the brain-damage card, which as my children know I generally play half-way through every game of Scrabble.

So those pillowcases never got to settle down in Sardinia, they came straight home again for some doctoring. I can tell you that as much thought and time – possibly even more - has gone into the 10 or 12 stitches which were required to turn an O into an A (14 times) than was expended by those nuns on the Bayeux tapestry. Pah, the nuns had it easy, just a bit of simple cable stitching. The result of my efforts, if produced by a six-year-old child in 1483 on her religious-themed sampler, would’ve got her knuckles rapped with a ruler. But I’m glad I changed it because the grammar pedant in me, who never sleeps or takes a day off, otherwise would’ve wept bitter tears every time it looked at a pillowcase.

Now there only remains the problem of Cerberus who guards the boarding gate. Those pillowcases are pretty much going to fill up that comedy suitcase, leaving perhaps enough room for a single swimsuit and a toothbrush. Fortunately we have persuaded the best host in the world to take them in his own hand luggage, which on the outward trip mostly contains vegetables from the Sussex garden and on the homeward trip home-made pesto from the Sardinian garden. So that’s alright then, as long as anything I want to wear in the evening is either made of silk or similar: something that will squash down into the size of an egg cup. Obviously we love pale floaty linen shirts and trousers for the evening, and they have the added bonus that they keep the mosquitoes off your legs. But let's face it, linen spends more time in the laundry than it does on your back and takes up too much room, so sorry lads, as Thomas Tuchel might’ve said last week but you're staying at home this time. It'll have to be a silk dress and an antihistamine for the evening.

I’m fascinated by the world’s Blue Zones, one of which is on Sardinia, and one of these days I will stop being so idle and get in the car and go and find it. Most of us would like to live a healthy, functional and happy life and reach 100, right? And maybe I’m being a big baby but one thing I won’t be doing on Sardinia is eating the cheese called casu marzu, the sheep’s milk pecorino made mainly in the mountains of Barbagia and in Dorgali on the east coast, which then has a hole made in it so that the cheese fly can lay eggs. You don’t have to ask those cheese flies twice. The maggots eat and excrete the cheese which apparently, I’ll take their word for it, creates a unique texture and flavour with a strong smell of ammonia. Yum. It’s thought that the enzymes produced by the larvae help digestion, and that in common with other fermented foods it contains kindly gut-friendly probiotics. I don’t care how friendly they are, take them away. If you want fermented food then let’s stick with some nice kefir or kimchi.

It’s forbidden to sell casu marza, and can technically only be made to give to friends and neighbours. Unsurprisingly - this is Sardinia - there’s a thriving black market trade in it. When the lagrimas (tears) seep through the rind then the cheese is ready to eat. And as if it wasn’t bad enough to be eating cheese with wrigglers in it (some absolute spoilsports kill the maggots before they eat it) there is the added bonus of the fact that the maggots are so happy and relieved to be released from their shell of cheese – as you would be - that they jump in the air and will probably poke your eye out while you’re eating it. My chickens would be all over it, which tells you pretty much all need to know about casu marza.

I once worked in a deli which had a justifiably famous cheese room. There was a bit of a frisson one day when a customer stormed in and returned a cheese. I can’t remember what it was, but it might have been an Epoisses or some stinky rind-washed thing. If you go into a room and something in there smells so bad that it’s as if someone has died under the floorboards, then I’ve never really seen the appeal of popping it into your mouth, but each to their own. Anyway, this family had delved into it with enthusiasm, like sailors on shore leave as PGW would say, and only after they’d all eaten some did they realise it was full of maggots. And this was not a cheese where maggots were supposed to be: it wasn’t technically a Maggot Gig. One of the man’s family had then thrown up. So that was embarrassing. If only I’d known to tell them about casu marzu and how those maggots were going to do great things for their microbiome so they’d live to be 100.

I’ve been having a little digital detox this week, not because of a sudden rush of high-mindedness or wish to distance myself from social media, or even to educate myself with heavy-duty literature instead of flipping enjoyably through the Mail online, but because I lost my phone at the weekend. I was running across fields in Wiltshire, hauling myself over post and rail fences and electric wire, again not because I had a yearning for the rigours of cross country running but because I was chasing a naughty dog, whom I shall hereafter refer to as Dennis because that is actually his name. You know those Olympic track athletes who bound along clearing hurdles without breaking their stride? Well, I didn’t look like that.

He eventually came to rest, or rather was brought to bay like a stag who runs to water, in a pond where he lay wallowing like a hippopotamus and breathing heavily, as I was myself, frankly. All I had to do was tackle the final post and rails/electric-fence combo and there was my quarry within reach, dripping wet. Then it was the plod homewards with an unrepentant Dennis, stopping to retrieve Beano who had been attached to a fence back on the start line and had remained there while the drama unfolded, slightly puzzled, like a tethered goat. Home we went, four dogs and two slightly emotional women, and when a rabbit suddenly shot across the lane (bad call, rabbit) Dennis caught it with the reactions of a rattlesnake. The other dogs could only look on in awe but quite honestly, Dennis, in the circumstances, the tactful move would’ve been to throttle back a bit on the hunter-gathering and look the other way.

So after all that when we got home, I realised that somewhere amidst all the excitement my telephone had also made a break for freedom. For various reasons I had absolutely zero interest in retracing my footsteps in order to find it. I didn’t honestly care where it was as long as I didn’t have to skim like a swallow over another electric fence.

Off to Hungerford to buy a replacement phone, which I couldn’t even pay for myself because I couldn’t remember my bank pin number, or indeed much else. A fog had descended and my brain seemed to have done a reset and restored the factory settings so I could barely recall my own name. In fact, my head seemed to be so full of air that it might’ve floated away if I hadn’t put my hand on top of it. Anyway, here I am with a secondhand iPhone with a dud non-Apple battery (he saw me coming) which has the numbers on it of my eight nearest and dearest and no others because I couldn’t remember them without my laptop, which was back at home in Sussex.

It’s an odd feeling, isn’t it? You’ll have been there at some point. You start with a completely clean slate because not only has your list of acquaintances shrunk to a dozen people but there are no newspapers on the telephone, no Wordle, no news updates or podcasts, no Waze to help me find my way, no Steps app to tell me how far I’ve walked (which is annoying because my Steps can be a bit sniffy if I don’t go far enough each day but I reckon even it would’ve been reluctantly impressed by the velocity and quantity of my Saturday morning steps. It might even have congratulated me with that little ting-ting bell sound).

No Instagram with cheery parrot videos or those impertinent targeted ads for do-it-yourself-funerals or comfy old-person shoes. No looking up interesting facts to settle an argument, or ordering anything online, or checking my bank balance in case my phone had been found and the finder had whizzed off to the shops (good luck with that, mate). None of those distractions all week, which actually has been a blessing because I was reading London Falling, the much-lauded book by Patrick Radden Keefe which is every bit as brilliant and gripping as everyone says. Quite apart from the actual story, his storytelling technique is awesome, drawing in apparently aimless threads to make the final pattern. There’s never been a time when I was less keen to riffle through Instagram or look up ‘flattering swimsuits’ or ‘what to do about my dog’s breath’ or ‘what are they spraying on the fields around me that smells like fly spray?’

Ideally in this sort of Nokia 3310-situation I might have written a novel or made some loose covers for an armchair or at the very least mowed my lawn but I regret to say not. I am merely waiting for the postman, my nose pressed to the window like a child on its birthday, and hoping my replacement SIM card will one day arrive. No hurry at all, Royal Mail, in your own time.

Hurtling along in our private fridges

My son in Dubai is preparing to take his driving test, which is all done very differently there. You do a bit of driving, than a test, then some parking and another test, then go on the highway, et cetera. I was pondering about what sort of car he might have and thinking, totally impractically, of a nice little convertible car so that he could zip about like Cary Grant.

Now I hear on the news that convertible cars are no longer selling – in the UK sales of convertible cars have fallen from 95,000 in 2004 to 12,000 this year: a massive drop of 85%. How sad. I have never managed to quite lose the idea that one day I would have a dear little convertible. Before my brain surgery in 2023, I was obsessed with being outside in the fresh air. For the first time in my life I actually would’ve liked to have lived by the seaside so that my head could get a regular buffeting by the wind. The best day of all in those strange pre-surgery weeks was when Soph was lent a Barbie-inspired pink convertible Fiat for the weekend.

Presumably, the weirdness and unpredictability of our climate, plus the preponderance of air-conditioning in cars has made us all less keen to drive about with the roof down. I don’t ever use air-con myself because I like having the windows open, it costs too much and I’m too mean (it adds 5 to 10% to your fuel costs) but mainly because mine doesn’t work. If I’m on the motorway, I notice that I’m pretty much the only car with the windows open. It seems like a bit of a metaphor for how we are now: we drive about isolated in our hermetically sealed, tinted-windowed refrigerated boxes. Perhaps that’s why we as a nation of drivers have become so aggressive and rude on the roads: I’m not making this up, people are definitely very trigger-happy in cars now, inviolate and protected from one another. If we all had a nice sociable convertible, we’d have to engage with each other a bit more and wave and say thank you as people still do who drive about in old classic cars. I’m not saying we need to go back to horses and carts, but there probably was a bit more cooperation and even badinage on the roads back then.

We were in Rosie’s car the other day and had a flat tyre and luckily her husband was with us because can any of us actually change a tyre on our own these days? It used to be the sort of essential thing a girl had to know how to do, but now we just ring the AA. And so lucky that Olly was with us because when he got all the kit out and started trying to loosen the nuts on the wheel they were stuck completely fast. He had to literally jump on the wheel brace for each one. I don't say this very often, but it was definitely a man's job.

We’ve had some memorable flat tyre episodes in my family: once the girls and I were on the A1 in Scotland coming south. Almost immediately a kind motorcycle policeman pulled in and changed the tyre for us, for which we were pathetically grateful. I've never forgotten what he said. ‘It's an absolute pleasure. Don't forget it's a Bank Holiday Monday - all I'll be doing all day is scraping motor-cyclists off the road.’

One time I had a car full of teenagers and we were just coming into Petworth. Rosie was driving and when she pulled over because the car was going bump bump, and we opened the doors, everybody screamed because there was a gigantic spider on the lower door sill. I have never seen five people fall out of a car quicker. One member of our group actually said he would rather go through circumcision again than get back in that car. The worst thing was that we never knew where it had gone: whether it disembarked onto the grass verge or found one of the many hiding places in the car. Rosie actually went to a party later that night and slept in the car, as you do at 18, which seemed to me brave beyond measure but there may have been drink taken which will have helped. I’ve always been darkly convinced that it came out of a bunch of bananas in the Tesco bag of shopping in the car.

My childhood, like our mother’s, was full of cows, sheep, dogs and ponies. I used to push Jack Russell puppies and baby goats around in my pram with bonnets on their heads, poor things. Every photograph that was ever taken of the family has at least one Jack Russell pootling around in the background. My first pony was grey; he was called Dandy. He stood 10 ½ hands high at the withers (42 inches) and had been born on a boat coming from the Isle of Man. He was not just my pony, but my friend and companion. I spent all day not just riding him but playing with him, grooming him, plaiting his mane, trying to teach him circus tricks – he took it all on the chin, that saint of a pony.

When I was summoned to the house for lunch, he would stand with his front feet on an old wooden champagne crate and wait for me. (How we did live back in the Sixties.) He never had to be tied up. He was more like a little dog than a pony. I would spend hours trying to stand on his back like a circus athlete, while he hirpled along at a rolling canter. My mother made a long strap which went through the pommel of his felt pad (a sort of rudimentary saddle) and down through the bit rings of his bridle: it was known as a Non-Eater because otherwise when he stretched his head down for a mouthful of grass, which was often, I flew straight over his head. At the end of the day when he had had enough circus tricks, he would give me a half-hearted bite and it was time to put him out in the field for the night.

Every spring, the preparations would start for the Pony Trek. This was the annual expedition of myself, my older sister Juliet and my mother, together with my friend Ann, her mother Araminta and older sister Jane. But when I say pony trekking, don’t for one moment get the idea into your head that this was some glamorous holiday in Russia or South America, on lean gaucho ponies scrambling up and down cliff tops, nimble and agile as lizards, the riders in Stetsons and suede chaps. No, no. Rid yourself of these ideas. These were obliging and unexcitable home bred ponies whose day jobs were the Pony Club, hunting and gymkhana events or in Dandy’s case, training to be a circus pony.

It doesn’t sound much, does it, when you say a pony trek in East Kent? but I cannot adequately explain to you the build-up and excitement for this event. Countries have been invaded with less planning. The two mothers would meet in the evenings with maps and drink whisky whilst discussing routes and journey times, though when I say ‘discussing’, what I mean is that Araminta made robust suggestions and my mother mostly fell in behind her.

Nobody ever packed for an expedition to the North Pole with as much attention to detail as we did. Everything was to be carried on our ponies - there would be no such frivolity as somebody backing us up in a car. We would ride about 8 miles a day and then stop and put our tents up in a field belonging to friends or relatives in other parts of Kent.

Our ponies jingled with all the accoutrements attached to their saddles: tents, sleeping bags (none of that de luxe nonsense of blow-up mattresses or lilos) saddle bags, saucepans, kettles; each of us had our own plastic mug attached to the D ring on our saddle. The ponies wore white woven fringes like curtain trimming on their brow bands, to keep the flies out of their eyes. No detail was overlooked. The mothers carried heavily annotated maps wrapped in plastic – literally everything was wrapped in plastic.

Sometimes we slept in a barn: on the plus side that meant no tents to put up, with all the arguments that that entailed; on the minus side there would inevitably be biting things in the straw and other unnamed things scampering around us. I can’t really remember what sort of food we had, but I suspect sausages featured quite highly on the list. Once we slept in a gypsy caravan belonging to an old shepherdess lady; she took the mothers down to the pub for a drink – highly irresponsible parenting – and Ann and I, left home alone in the crumbly old caravan, were certain we would be kidnapped or murdered while they were away.

It was the law that we changed out of our day clothes and into our pyjamas each night, with none of that sloppy behaviour such as sleeping in our vests and pants. I can still remember the row that ensued when Ann put on her pyjamas over her day vest instead of her night vest (try and keep up) and her mother spotted it. At the age of about seven, I was torn between relief at not being in trouble myself and the inevitable anxiety experienced by most of my family when there was any sort of ruck kicking off.

So tremendous was the Vest storm breaking over our heads that when my mother whispered, do you want to go and see Emma being put down? I agreed without hesitation. But who was Emma? Was she a cat or a guinea pig? Naturally I didn’t actually want to see anything being put down but it was a chance to escape the Great Vest Controversy. It turned out that Emma was our hosts’ newest baby and I was merely required to admire the brilliance of Emma doing clever things in her bath.

Big things were happening in the 1960s: the civil rights movement, JFK, Profumo, the Cuban missile crisis - but down in East Kent order had to be maintained and who knew what demons could be unleashed if you slept with your day vest under your pyjamas? (and did any of us actually need a Chilprufe vest in August?) Or even worse, failed to put your day clothes in plastic bags to keep the dew off them?

Damp was the great enemy, so although there was nothing soft to sleep on there was always a ground sheet and we slept for some obscure reason with our saddles propped up to provide a sort of protective frame for our heads. Just what a serge, horse-hair covered, slightly sweaty saddle lining might protect us from is anyone's guess. I can still taste the tea, lukewarm and slightly smoky in a sticky plastic mug (always your own mug. If you lost your mug, that was pretty much curtains.) It was a massive adventure, richly augmented by map malfunctions and getting lost, someone leaving something vital like the kettle behind at the last campsite, thunderstorms, and the huge excitement one night when all our ponies’ head collars were stolen from them whilst they grazed in the Leigh-Pemberton’s field. Drama! Police! We wouldn’t have swapped those days for anything.

How to weigh a barn owl

I’ve been devoted to barn owls since the day we bought a house in West Sussex and inherited the resident barn owl; thus becoming involved with the local owl trust, even having one chick to live in the house when it was in imminent danger of being eaten by its older siblings. I have a big empty barn here just across the drive from my house and hear the chicks in the nest there when I go out in the evenings. Great excitement yesterday because Chrissi from the local Barn Owl Trust in West Sussex came with ladders to check out what was happening in the owl box and to measure, weigh and ring the chicks. 70% of barn owls die in the first year of their life: if they survive that first year they may live for about four years; much more in captivity. Last year an 18 year-old barn owl was discovered in Lincolnshire. But mostly they are beset by a million challenges - derelict barns get done up and sold, food is scarce or has been poisoned, the chicks fall out of the nests very easily and are prone to drowning in water troughs - so they need all the help they can get. A properly designed box in either a tree or an empty barn is literally a lifeline for them - if you know anybody who is thinking of putting up a box, it’s worth watching a video for tips on the best ones HERE because the wrong box can be fatal.

I say the barn here is empty, in fact it’s far from empty because there are vintage cars in there which meant Chrissi’s getting up to the owl box was fraught with difficulty. I couldn’t believe how agile she was in climbing up a relay of ladders and then lying stretched out to open the inspection hatch and see what was going on. There were four chicks which she carried down in individual cloth bags like shoe bags.

It transpired that the eldest was about 45 days old; all of them had adult feathers starting to grow through the white fluff. I haven’t registered before that the owls sit on an egg as soon as they’ve laid one and then carry on laying, so that there isn’t a clutch of eggs as such and the chicks hatch in relays. Both in the cloth bags and when we held them, they lay completely still on their backs, like stone effigies of Crusaders on their tombs. Kingfishers and robins are the same, Chrissi said: if you lie them on their backs, they freeze. Every so often the barn owl mother drifted past the open barn door to see what was going on. While we held the chicks, Chrissi wedged herself high up on the ladder and turfed out months’ worth of accumulated muck from the box. Then it was time for the babies to go back into their individual bags - they slid in as obligingly and neatly as if they were a piece of chicory - albeit chicory with large dirty feet like hobbits - back up the ladder and into the freshly spring-cleaned box. They don't keep a very tidy house, these barn owl mothers, they could do with that Mrs Hinch getting in there with her Marigolds and the Zoflora.

Some May things

Here is Beano having a refreshing early morning swim before he goes back and bothers the rats.

And here are Elizabeth Bennet, Mrs Rochester and Lady Catherine de Burgh competitively sitting on the same egg. I put lavender in the nest boxes as advised by Arthur Parkinson; perhaps it's just too comfortable in there?

So how are we all getting on with preparing for food shortages? Any advance on dried pasta, bottled water and loo paper? The government’s tentative proposal that supermarkets might cap the price of essentials such as milk and eggs has gone down like a ton of bricks; inevitably, with supermarket margins already wafer thin, any such idea means that the hardship would naturally be passed down to the farmers. Food inflation is likely to reach 10% by the end of the year and whilst the current harvests are not so much affected, the price of fertiliser having doubled from £350 per tonne to £630 per tonne means that farmers will delay planting this year, so no winter crops and probable shortages next year. It’s not looking great, is it? And still about 2,000 ships (not forgetting the poor people stuck on them) beleaguered in the Strait of Hormuz. Defra’s Dame Angela Eagle says that food resilience is a matter of national security and she’s not wrong.

In the 1950s Adrian Bell, the farmer and writer from Suffolk whose books were read again and again by my mother, wrote in his Countryman’s Notebook: ‘At the start of the last war, there were almost half a million farms in Britain, including part-time holdings. The majority were small mixed units of less than 50 acres. Before the age of state protection farmers needed to grow a range of products for financial security. At the same time, almost a million workers were employed on British farms. Yet it cost the taxpayers nothing. If politicians had truly understood agriculture, they would’ve recognised that the mixed-farm structure was a national treasure to be nurtured and prized.’

The Food Programme on BBC Radio 4 usually has something interesting to say and this week it wondered about the future of our fruit and vegetables and talked to suppliers. Not only do we rely too heavily on imported fruit but the farmers are forced to rely on foreign pickers because the short intense picking season of perhaps only four or five months makes it hard to recruit locals. Plus Brexit has caused problems with visas for foreign pickers: a fruit grower from Kent said that all their pickers were from Kurdistan or Uzbekistan. And a tomato grower from Lancashire had been preparing to put down an extra 7 acres of glass houses but rocketing energy costs have put a stop to that and the plot sits idle. You can listen to this episode HERE

Our ratio of self-sufficiency in the UK is about 60% at the moment (it peaked at around 78% in 1984). We’re strong on meat and dairy and grow plenty of cereals but fruit and vegetables are mostly imported – we produce only 15% of the fruit and 50% of the vegetables we eat. Only 20% of the tomatoes we eat are grown in the UK! We’re in need of more market gardens, more polytunnels and readier access for more people to fresh organic food. Guy Singh-Watson, the pioneering founder of Riverford Organic, was famously once offered 6p per lettuce by a supermarket buyer and told him where he could stick his 6p. He believes that for every planned new supermarket it should be built into their contract that there are spaces for farmers’ markets in the car park, selling fresh local produce. The organic permaculture community garden where I help out each week does this on a small but vital scale: producing homegrown vegetables to feed those in the community that need a bit of extra help and as importantly, involving vulnerable members of the community in the project.

I have to admit that until I listened to the Food Programme I had never heard of LSA’s. The Land Settlement Association was created in 1934 by Ramsey McDonald’s government. It was a bold social experiment which aimed to re-employ struggling miners and shipbuilders from the Special Areas and settle them on the land. It was a partial success and created a model of cooperative and consultative farming so that by the time war broke out in 1939, 1,100 smallholdings had been created. The scheme was supported by philanthropic bodies such as the Quakers and the Carnegie Trust and it was was a brave effort to get people back into the countryside and away from urban unemployment. The men were given training, a small plot of land, 3 – 5 acres, a house and a piggery but when war came, they were needed back in the heavy industries again. Stella Swain’s grandparents were part of the LSA and lived and worked on the largest LSA settlement, 591 acres in Sidlesham, Sussex: you can read a piece she wrote for Vittles that was published on Substack HERE.

In the end, the scheme was abolished in 1983. Pigs might fly, because the current government considers farmers an impertinent nuisance - because why bother with them when we can just import everything? - but I did wonder whether it wasn’t the moment to introduce some sort of bold scheme like that.

the thing about handbags

Sorry, this is trivial stuff, but I’ve been slightly anti-handbag for years. I couldn’t really see the point of them, and never understood why people lose their minds over handbags. In the UK the average woman owns 14 handbags and the annual revenue on handbags alone is between £2.5 and £3.5 billion. Crikey. When I was married, I used to put a lipstick in my husband’s pocket when we went out and that was that. And in lockdown we were only allowed out once a day – it was a bit like being a boarding school, only one outing and always go in pairs and be back in time for chapel. Any car park around here that’s used by dog walkers gets regularly targeted by thieves (who smash your window for the pound coins under the dashboard which then costs you £500 to get mended) so there was no point in taking a handbag anywhere during lockdown: I used to stick a bankcard in my pocket. Now we pay with our phones and it's even easier.

But for some obscure reason I am now starting to feel the need of a handbag again and I can’t quite work out why. Perhaps it’s all the variety of glasses/ contact lenses/ sunglasses one might need, and the suncream and the lip salve and the driver’s licence for when you go to the council tip (one of my favourite destinations), but I am starting to cast my eye enviously over nice handbags.

When she was well into her 80s, my beloved Aunt Margaret, observing a coach party of people going into the theatre, said to me ‘However old and mad I get please don’t ever let me go out with my handbag slung across my body like a satchel.’ This has sort of stayed with me and I’m going to be unpopular when I say that I detest the look of those crossbody bags. I don’t care how practical they are, they look awful. And when I start to look about at bags, and I don't want to sound like whoever it was in Gulliver's Travels - well, obviously, it was Gulliver, who came back hating everybody and thinking that humans smelt - but is it just me or are bags quite ugly these days? They've become a bit shapeless and lacking in structure; I mean, I've seen hot water bottle bottles with more dignity than some handbags.

Ideally the sort of nice-looking handbag you might take racing. Not too big; I don’t have to take a book to read when I go racing and I’m probably not going to need my laptop. Sort of like the one that our late Queen used to carry, though as I learned recently in the Buckingham Palace gift shop those Launer handbags now cost about £2,300: I could buy several cars for that. Anyway, that sort of handbag in a less old-fashioned shape; which back in the day was just called a ‘handbag’, is now known as a ‘top handle handbag’ to differentiate it from the ones that my Aunt so abhorred. I do have a lovely black Gucci bag from the Sixties which Rosie inherited from her grandmother, and I have sort of borrowed, but one doesn’t always want a black one. And what I have discovered is that they are either crazily expensive or come in a range of pastel colours which suggest Ladies’ Day at Aintree. Or they have far too many shiny gilt bits on them, probably popular with magpies, and some are a very strange sausage shape as if they contain a small rolled-up sleeping bag – I don’t think we’d have seen our Queen carrying one of those. The best I've so far found are made by Tusting, an old family-run firm from Buckinghamshire, but I am still working on the shortlist.

I am so lucky to be able to walk daily in Petworth Park, just about a mile from me. It’s a huge deer park of about 700 acres, surrounded by a 5 mile stone wall and was (obviously) designed by that busy man Lancelot Capability Brown, who was responsible over his lifetime for some 170 gardens and parks. His name came about because he always tactfully remarked to the owner that the site had ‘great capabilities’. There’s no picturesque stone bridge, which was one of his signatures, but there are fallow deer, there are two lakes for Beano’s morning swim and most importantly for me it’s big enough that we can see a black Labrador coming a mile off and steer a wide berth, since black labradors arouse the same sort of tumultuous anxiety in his breast as spiders do in mine. Yesterday as it was trying to rain all morning we more or less had the park to ourselves. Please admire Beano's restraint with the deer. He is badly behaved in most respects (big apologies to my hostess at supper last night) but quite steady on deer. Laziness probably.

At bedtime last night, I heard what I thought was a cat up a tree but I haven't got a cat. So I consulted my Merlin app who said it was a Little Owl; well that was a surprise because I've been hearing something completely different and thinking it was a little owl. More research needed. Anyway, this is a rubbish video and you need to turn the sound up.

I’ve been absent: apologies for disappearing. My father used to say world-wearily when we children clamoured for his attention: ‘Sorry dear, my mind was on other matters’. Of which we took no notice at all. Post-war, I suspect many men were distracted and absent in mind, and if men tend not to share their troubles readily these days, how much worse were they 80 years ago? Nowadays, we've gone the other way and we tend to over-share.

I’ve been thinking this week amidst the maelstrom of political and geopolitical events and the eternally revolving door of 10 Downing Street, how much of everything comes down to personality and whether people like you. You can have brilliantly clever people with such abrupt personalities that nobody wants to work with them and they end up working alone in a laboratory or being lumberjacks, then other people of seemingly moderate abilities who get on with people, smooth the rough edges or possibly just have good judgement and build a happy team around them. Trust is everything. And it’s an unhappy fact in politics that once the voting public have decided they don’t like you, you’re toast.

Going on from this I thought about a bedside manner and how important it is in the medical profession. I’ve always felt that in oncology, the doctors and nurses seem to be handpicked just as much for their kindness and general loveliness as for their knowledge. I’ve been chasing up some CT scans lately; my head gets looked at regularly for which I’m grateful. I was spoilt with my previous oncologist who would always send me the pictures on WhatsApp as soon as she had them, within a couple of days of the scan, saying something encouraging like ‘Looks fine, good brain growth’. We very much like that sort of message.

This time, after four weeks of not hearing anything, I was a little restive. No news is good news they say, but you do wonder so I rang the hospital.

Me: I wonder if I could speak to Dr X’s secretary.

Oncology: She’s away on leave.

Me: Ah. I’m not due to see Dr X for another three weeks and I’d really like to find out about my CT results.

Oncology: Well we’re not allowed to give out results. And they’re probably not here yet.

Me: I think they will be, it was four weeks ago.

Oncology: … Yes they are here.

(Pregnant pause)

Oncology: (sigh) I’ll have to email Dr X and say you want to speak to him.

Me: Well yes, thank you.

Dr X called six days later. The scan of the brain was fine and clear. BUT he said there was something else concerning him (uh-oh! here we go). Something was showing up around my TMJ (which is that joint in our cheek which does all the heavy lifting work of opening and shutting our jaw). I’ve had endless problems with it ever since the brain surgery, and have been in and out of dentists and physios, assuming that it was just a mechanical problem which wouldn’t be entirely surprising, given the bashing my head must’ve had.

‘It doesn’t look like cancer’ he said doubtfully (if I’m honest, not quite as heartily as I might’ve wished.) ‘We need new bloods and we will get an MRI.’

It’s interesting, how one reacts physically on hearing something you don’t particularly want to hear. I’ve made a bit of a study of it over the last 12 years or so: I get a sort of cold wash down my arms and go rigid as if I’m standing under one of those lorries pouring concrete. Perhaps that’s what happened to whoever it was who turned into a pillar of salt? Lot’s wife, wasn’t it? Because she turned to look backwards at Sodom and Gomorrah, as one might. Shock absolutely turns you into a pillar of salt. Anyone else get that? Wodehouse (obviously): ‘He looked like a man who, stooping to pluck a nosegay of wild flowers on a railway line, is struck in the small of the back by the Cornish Express’. Well, exactly.

We don’t faint so much these days, do we? Patricia Wentworth’s girls are always fainting: one whiff of a drama or the suspicion that their nice young man has been lying and they go down like a sack of potatoes. It must have been the corsets. Then somebody had to produce smelling salts.

So when you get a bit of a shock like a dodgy medical prognosis, how do you deal with it? For me it’s some conscious breathing, cuddle the dog, make a cup of tea and then ring somebody (not necessarily one’s children until you’ve calmed down) but a good friend. You speak to that friend who will listen and offer practical and emotional help, as I did and she did. Trying to deal with things yourself is not the answer on these occasions; you draw massive reassurance from a friend. And then there is always the huge comfort of a book to get lost in when you want to distract yourself. Patricia Wentworth, of course, is my current comfort read.

Getting behind the wheel of a car when you've had a shock is not ideal. You see it all the time on TV dramas: the accused comes up with an absolute rubbish alibi: he went for a drive to calm himself down, clear his head. No, no! I cry, that is such a terrible idea! Yes, I know it’s only a story but you get the idea. Don’t drive when you’re in a state.

But what it really shows – I told you I was making a bit of a study of it – is how fast your brain reacts to shock and socks you with a physical reaction. My mother, every morning with her early cup of tea, used to turn to a little book of daily biblical texts which she would study and absorb. I tend to see what the Stoics have to say. Because if a shock can give such a speedy physical response then how much can positive thinking affect us and make us stronger every day? So this time I try and take a leaf out of Epictetus’s book: hardships are not inherently bad, we need to regard them as something that will toughen us up. Our mind is ours, only we can shape it. I chivvy my mind towards the idea that it’s most likely a paltry infection hiding up there under my cheekbone. Yeah, let’s go with a bit of inflammation. See it, say it, sorted, as Epictetus didn’t say. (My dictation app turned that into a ‘poultry infection’, which is of course always a possibility.)

Always have a set of bagpipes with you

Gen Z get a mixed press, but I loved the story in yesterday’s Times about Sasha Murray Threipland who’s decided to live in a campervan while he’s in his final year at St Andrews and save himself £1200 a month on rent. I mean, many of us quite like the idea of a dear little house on wheels, like Mr. Toad, with everything under one roof and within reach. But the reality can be a bit different. He must be as tough as old boots to live in a van throughout a Scottish winter and swim in the North Sea instead of having a morning shower; his birthday present this month is going to be an MOT for the Sprinter van.

He sounds properly enterprising – the original plan was to live in the harbour, but he couldn’t get onto the waiting list for a mooring and decided to buy a van instead, which he then renovated himself. He grew up in a castle with presumably no shortage of space; I’m absolutely in awe of how much he seems to have crammed into the van, including two sets of bagpipes. ‘I think my mother probably still doesn’t quite see the point.’ Well no, but since many of his generation will never be able to afford to buy their own houses I’d say he has made the point very well. Especially as he lives on a magnificently frugal £35 a week.

Hurrah for May

May is just the best time; everything looks good and smells good and there is promise in the air. Drum's birthday this week and in Dubai he's running on the beach in a UPF sun protection hoodie: here we're still lighting a fire every night. Here, for no particular reason, are Lizzie and Mary Bennet and Mrs. Rochester enjoying their breakfast mash with some cottage cheese in it while Beano stands looking on jealously and wondering why he doesn't get cottage cheese.

Last night when I took Beano out late I could hear at the same time not only the barn owls but a tawny owl, a cuckoo and a nightingale; it did make me come over a bit Shakespearean. Fair play to the cuckoo who is not here for very long, hence the poignancy of his song, and who has dubious parenting skills to say the least of it, but he does put in the hours while he’s here.

A lovely invitation from friends to come and see Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style, on until October at the King’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace. It features a staggering number of her clothes - some 300 pieces with shoes and hats and baby dresses as well as her wedding dress and Coronation gown. Where on earth are all these dresses stored? they must take up a staggering amount of space, especially all those great big princessy embroidered and embellished ballgowns. Somebody has been looking after them beautifully for all these years: perhaps they’ve been in cold storage or had bunches of lavender stuffed up the skirts to keep the moths away. We did use the audio guides but I wished I hadn’t and ditched it: I must be very stupid but I find it hard to look at the clothes, read the notices and listen to a fashiony person talking all at the same time.

The uniforms were there, including the beautiful femininely-cut regimental jacket she wore each year when she rode side-saddle at the Birthday Parade. Hats and silk scarves, the guides’ uniform and what was called utility clothing – I knew about utility furniture in the war but I didn’t realise there was utility clothing - a plain little jacket and skirt made of inexpensive material and with not too many buttons. Apart from that one item I have to say utility and thrift wouldn’t have been the watchword. Our Queen was going out to represent her country and she said it with satin and silk and tulle, embroidery and seed pearls and many bugle beads.

Her wedding dress was made of ivory duchesse satin, and silk for the train came from Lullingstone Castle silk farm in Kent. It was news to me that there even were silkworms in England – Lady Hart Dyke apparently started the silk farm in 1929 (her grandson Tom Hart Dyke designed the World Garden of Plants: 8,000 plants collected at the castle) and they provided silk for the Royal family. Queen Mary visited in 1936, presumably to check that the silkworms came from the right sort of background. Thirty rooms of the house were taken over to breed the silkworms and Lady Hart Dyke’s son later said that as a child he couldn’t sleep for the smell and the munching sound of all those very hungry caterpillars. That is smart, no? People think they’re pretty grand when they have their own private jet, but I’m not sure that having your own silk farm with your own dear little silkworms doesn’t trump that.

But how, and sorry to lower the tone here, but how on earth did Her Majesty visit the loo in one of those bunchy-skirted tiny-waisted Cinderella dresses? Or did she have to be like Scarlett O’Hara eating before she went to a party - visiting the bathroom before she got into her dress and then not again till she got home? (We know she was an abstemious drinker and eater; no wonder). How would you even lift those skirts without seed pearls and crystals popping off and skittering and bouncing all over the floor? Honourable mention should also go to Rigby & Peller, corsetières to the late Queen, Princess Margaret and Lady Diana. Our Queen had a tiny waist and a generous enbonpoint and really hats off to them for keeping the whole show on the road as it were; except that June Kenton lost her Royal Warrant when she wrote a book called Storm in a D Cup in which she told of her visits to the Palace, although as she later insisted she didn’t give any ‘naughty details.’

Years ago my parents went to a dinner at Windsor Castle and my mother reported with some embarrassment that when she came down the staircase she heard a rustling sound and initially thought it was her swishing petticoats and then realised she’d got some straw up under her dress from when she had visited the mare and a new foal in the stables before she left home in Kent. I don’t suppose Her Majesty ever dared to visit the stables in one of those big frocks but I imagine she might have liked to.

Some good jewels and tiaras on display at the exhibition: I thought they must be copies, but I asked one of the staff and she said no no, they’re real. It would be rather lovely wouldn’t it to be able to pop a tiara on? The Daily Mail are always telling us ways of elevating our outfits; mine quite frankly is to put a long coat on over the whole thing. (I realised just as I got on the train that a button had come off my coat which is far from elevating: it’s an instant way to depress your outfit. If only I had a lady-in-waiting, I thought, that wouldn’t have happened.) But a tiara is the ultimate way of elevating your outfit; similarly the Queen could wear a simply cut coat with a stonking great brooch on it.

While I was walking round I thought about Meghan and her clothes, and obviously she wasn’t a working royal for very long so probably never absorbed the royal dressing rules, or of the ethos of wearing clothes again and again, as the brilliantly frugal Princess Royal does. It’s funny really because Meghan apparently spends a lot of money on her clothes, she’s got a great figure and long legs and you think she would be the perfect clothes horse and yet they never look quite right. The Coco Chanel maxim used to be look at yourself in the mirror and remove one thing, didn’t it? I sometimes think that Meghan needs to put one more thing on.

It did make me think of the pressure on the Royal designers Norman Hartnell, Hardy Amies and then Ian Thomas in the 70s - who introduced those chiffons and bright colours and patterns, Her Majesty’s answer to cruisewear - right through to Angela Kelly. Imagine having to quickly rustle up designs for a sudden trip to America or Fiji or Paris, tactfully incorporating the colours of the country’s flag or their native flowers. The drawings for the designs alone are works of art. Apparently, the Queen used to write Yes or No on the sketches. That would be a dispiriting moment, wouldn’t it, getting your homework back and your exquisitely-designed sketch had a big No across it? I have a friend who used to work for Hardy Amies and she went a couple of times to the Palace with Miss Lillian for fittings: ‘I was just about allowed to hold the box of pins’.

Grubs

Well, the moths are here again for their summer holiday and thankfully most of us haven’t got to worry about keeping them out of the Royal frocks, but there is something vile about moths flying out of your cupboard. And desperately creepy about a piece of carpet that the little grubs have chewed. Their favourite thing in the whole world is a pair of old UGG boots. Luckily, they are repelled by the same sort of things as the you-know-whats in the autumn. Like them, they’re complete weirdos and they hate the smell of citrus, lavender, cedar, rosemary, and thyme, clean scents that on the whole we rather like. Nancy Birtwistle, she of the eco-friendly cleaning materials and tremendous common sense, advises using diatomaceous earth, (which as far as I can work out is made from fossilised diatoms; no, me neither). I happen to have some of that because I use it in the chicken house to keep red mite away (although now that I have a recycled plastic house, they’re not an issue). So you can sprinkle that on the carpets. They don’t like it. If you think the moths have been lurking around your clothes, then put them in the freezer for 24 hours. We all know about lavender for moths, and home-made lavender bags are the best thing to hang in your wardrobe; the other thing is only storing clean clothes because moths are grubby little creatures and like to lay their eggs somewhere a bit sticky. So if you’ve got cashmere jerseys you really mind about then put them away clean and sweet-smelling into mothproof bags. I make a spray out of various essential oils diluted with water as advised by Nancy: I’m not sure how well it really works but it does make the room smell great.

Highly recommend this

I’ve just had my first appointment with a new craniosacral therapist: a physiotherapist once advised me to find a practitioner after my brain hoo-ha and I was treated by a lovely lady for about a year but she’s now moved away. It’s hard to describe the process – and to be honest I have no idea what the process is - but it somehow harnesses the natural rhythms of the body to encourage the body to heal itself, through very light touch. This lady has worked for years with dentists and yesterday I had intra-oral massage for the first time, super-helpful for problems with one’s jaw, TMJ, maxilla, headaches, neck pain … all of which have been a bit of a feature of my life, unsurprisingly, since brain surgery. You come away with an immense sense of lightness. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio. And thank heavens for that.

Not an especially Eastery thing to do, and there was no suggestion of chick nor child nor anyone wearing bunny ears, but Sophia and I went last weekend to 48 Doughty Street in Bloomsbury, a Georgian terraced house and the home between 1837 and 1840 of the writer, journalist, court reporter, sketch writer, philanthropist, novelist and contradictory force of nature, the whirlwind that was Charles Dickens. At 25 years of age he took a three-year lease at £80 a year and moved in with his wife Catherine and the first of their ten children, Charley.

I have a particular weakness, as you know, for museums that are houses - and the Dickens Museum has gathered together satisfactory quantities of Dickensian memorabilia. There is a Folgate Street feel to the layout and the meticulous attention to detail – his desk! His inkwell! The collar he was wearing when he died! - and the house is presumably very much as the Dickens family would’ve known it. Starting at the kitchens - we love a kitchen, don’t we? - and it was news to me that hedgehog was often kept in Victorian kitchens to keep on top of the beetle situation. Dickens and his wife had four staff when they were living at Doughty Street; his brother Frederick was often there, and Dickens’ parents, and Catherine’s sister Mary Hogarth lived with them, so there wouldn’t have been abundant space but Dickens always loved having plenty of people around him and even when he went to the countryside for some peace and quiet to write, he always ended up with company. It was in Doughty Street one evening that 17 year old Mary, having been to the theatre with her sister and brother-in-law, collapsed and died the next day, and was extravagantly and intemperately mourned by Charles.

The cook apparently slept in the kitchen and I’m not sure that she didn’t have the best of it – apart from the hedgehog and the beetles she probably had it to herself: it was her domain. At the top of the house is the nursery and a small servant’s room next door where the nursemaid and perhaps another servant slept. Very stout bars in the attic, surely, to keep in one small boy of under two years old and the baby Mary? but this heavily barred window frame came from the Marshalsea debtors’ prison in Southwark, where John Dickens was sent in 1824; Dickens, deeply affected at 12 years old, stored up the memories and used it as the setting for Little Dorrit.

Those Doughty Street servants would have earned their keep, running up and down five flights of stairs with hot water for washing or removing chamber pots for emptying. When the Dickens’ moved in there were already two modern water closets in the house, one on the ground floor and one in the basement, so the lucky cook had not just a hedgehog but an en-sweetie. I'd like to know more about this cook; in 1852 Catherine published a cookery book called What shall we have for Dinner? under the Pythonesque name of Lady Maria Clutterbuck.

Dickens was always on the move, walking for miles or riding, at the theatre or the law courts or reporting in the House of Commons, renting houses in the country here or there, or travelling abroad or at the London Library or the Garrick Club. He was energetic and restless: as a Victorian man, he had the freedom to go where he wanted. I did wonder seeing this tall narrow house with three rooms on each floor how life would’ve been as his wife, spending all day in a corset, very largely confined to the home, with very little privacy. Not much chance of taking off your corset, kicking off your shoes and flopping onto the sofa. A Victorian wife was in the power of her husband; her property was subsumed into his and she was expected to be entirely fulfilled by the home and her children. The Great Exhibition of 1851 showcased the first ever public flushing loo and it wasn’t until 1893 that public lavatories for ladies were opened opposite the law courts in the Strand, which must’ve been quite a magic moment for them. If I seem obsessive about matters of hygiene, it just struck me how limited were Victorian women, their very travel - or walking, or shopping - opportunities defined by modesty and the demands of the bladder.

Catherine was by all accounts (do read Claire Tomalin’s fabulous biography) gentle and uncomplicated; her parents were Scottish and friends of Walter Scott and Robert Burns. There was never any question of her being Charles’s intellectual equal or in any way able to compete with him for cleverness and energy. Many of the ideal young women in Dickens’s novels were ‘angels of the house’, drippy girls who needed the strength and protection of a man, and he seemed to approve the idea that woman’s usefulness and influence should be confined to the domestic; (although he was an obsessive mover of furniture and liked everything just so, even in a hotel room, so perhaps even in the home he was a bit of a bossy boots).

But he was after all a Victorian and a man of many parts: kind to the poor and cruel to his wife. It was well understood that without the quiet unassuming presence of a subservient wife at home, a man could not develop his full potential: women who defied his pure ideals, like Lady Dedlock, came to a sticky end. But he came to regret his young and hasty marriage and it ended after 20 years when he fell in love with an 18-year-old actress. He admired and celebrated strong and successful women like the heiress and philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts (without, probably wanting to be married to one); his tenderness of feeling was largely reserved for the little drudges from the workhouse like the poor child who had worked for his parents; (grown men were reduced to tears at the plight and death of Little Nell); he fretted for the poor and the dispossessed and despised parliament and its lack of ability to do anything about it.

But that was all still to come: when Katey was born they left Doughty Street for a large elegant house at 1 Devonshire Terrace. Dickens at 28 was busy, successful and beginning to be something of a rockstar; when he travelled to America, women snipped off surreptitious locks of his gorgeous hair.

A film

Also not particularly Eastery: we watched I Swear, based on the true story of John Davidson (Robert Aramayo) who grew up in Galashiels in Scotland in the 1980s, developed Tourette’s Syndrome and was relentlessly bullied and misunderstood. Not easy viewing and I watched some of it through my fingers but what a fabulous story and a great redemptive story arc; thank heavens there are such GOOD people in the world.

A piece

Great piece by Libby Purves in the Times this week, (‘Decent shame kept us honest, now it’s extinct’) apropos of the Waitrose employee who was sacked for tackling a recidivist shoplifter because it was against HR rules. Worth a read if you missed it or if you can get past the paywall HERE. Her point being that these days we feel no shame, no matter what we do. We blame the cost of living, our mental health, our parents, the system, the world. It’s never our fault. And yet shame used to be the habitual silent policeman that lived in our heads. I remember my village school in the 1960s where a boy called Andrew always seemed to be standing in the corner wearing the pointy D hat. If we behaved badly, we were called out for it. Now perhaps because organised religion, and faith, plays a diminishing part in our lives and discipline is a horrid dirty word, we have lost that silent critic. There will always be somebody else to blame. I imagine that every shoplifter in town, knowing that Waitrose is implacably imposed to restorative justice, is heading down there with a capacious shopping bag to fill their boots.

My chickens are already clamouring for maternity leave

The chickens at any rate have decided that there will be chicks; I have decided that there will not be. Five is a very good number but both Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Mrs Rochester, who have only been laying eggs for about two weeks, have decided that Easter is a good time to be broody and sit inscrutably on a nest instead of fossicking about in the sunshine, refusing to move even when one of the nicely productive hens gets in beside them to lay an egg. When they do come out for a quick flutter round and a rant, they’re fluffed up and furious as only a self-righteously hormonal bantam can be. It seems a bit much to me that after just a few days of laying eggs they’ve already decided that that’s good enough and they’ll now down tools and go on mat leave for the next six months.

Like Lady Catherine and Mrs Rochester, I'm having a week off next week. Unlike them, I'll be back on St George's Day.

Easter: it’s a beginning, isn’t it? Spring, Easter chicks, lambs, green shoots. It has its roots in pre-Christian, pagan rites of renewal and fertility. Much more of a beginning than the New Year when we’re still really in the grip of winter; I actually find New Year a little depressing: it’s a little too much like the tolling of the bell, what exactly did I achieve in that last year? But Easter is positive and hopeful, spring and summer stretch before us, it’s all to come. Here in the affluent Southeast one of the particular signs of Easter is the arrival of the soft top cars on the roads: the smug marrieds are out and about in their convertibles and they’ll put on headscarfs and flat caps and keep that roof down even if it kills them.

For some reason the Easter hymn There is a Green Hill far away (by Cecil Frances Alexander, whom I always imagined was a man but I now realise was a woman) always makes me think of my brother Julius, who died aged 23 of a form of aplastic anaemia. He was in the church choir, we all were, and although he definitely sang the solo in Once in Royal David’s City, I don’t remember if sang the solo at Easter. But that hymn for some reason brings Julius to mind. We even had it at his funeral, although he died in August.

My mother confessed after his funeral that in many ways she was happier than she had been at his christening, when she was beginning to suspect that there was something very wrong with this frail baby. Whereas now at least she knew that the struggle was over for him. I can only try and imagine the feelings of a mother towards a child for whom she knows life will be probably short and very likely difficult. I got it wrong for years and always used to send her flowers on the anniversary of the day he died, but once I had my own children I realised that there’s only one of that sort of anniversary, whereas there will have been probably several or many birthdays. Including Julius’s eighth birthday when she gave him a cricket party and a cricket cake but all the little boys were bowled out by teatime and she had to find something else for them to do. So once I had had Soph, I got it and I used to send Mum flowers on Julius’s birthday instead.

When she first took Julius to a local hospital in 1947, they said there was nothing they could do for him. Somebody must’ve encouraged them to try Great Ormond Street: I had this vision as a child of my mother clutching a baby to her breast dashing from pillar to post, possibly through a blizzard in complete desperation. I don’t suppose it was like that at all: I imagine they carried him in the Moses basket up on the train in an orderly fashion. Anyway Great Ormond Street were wonderful and miraculous, saved his life and Julius had treatment there every month until he outgrew a children’s hospital and started going to Saint Mary’s Paddington for his regular blood transfusions. He didn’t mind going to hospital, Mum put him on the train with his little suitcase and Dad met him in London and took him to the hospital. The nurses loved him because he was so good with the younger children and the babies, and being quite small and gentle himself was a reassuring playmate for tiny homesick children.

Don’t imagine for a moment he had an invalid life: I think in many ways it was a much better life than my mother had feared when she first held that little blue baby and had her dark thoughts about Rentokil and DDT. He loved cricket and racing and kept meticulous records of his bets; he drove a little maroon mini and lived away from home as a journalist on the local newspaper. When he was in the midst of his final illness aged 23, at the Royal Free Hospital, my mother used to catch the train up regularly to sit with him and try and get him to eat; even half a peach was a triumph. She would often get there harassed from the train journey, and find him asleep with a breakfast tray sitting untouched on his table, out of his reach where somebody not very sensitive had dumped it. She had a strong faith herself and found it completely natural that sometimes when she woke him to try and give him a bit of fruit she felt that she was dragging him back from a long way away. He’s starting to go, she said.

Anyway, Easter… Julius… There was a green hill. One of the reasons perhaps that I particularly love the Gary Bunt series of paintings about Jesus and the cross HERE

A community garden

I might sound like somebody out of a Barbara Pym book, and I don't mean to, but I’ve been looking for some way of volunteering locally. When I first got my driving licence back early last year after 16 long months off the road, my first thought was to volunteer as a driver for Macmillan Cancer to take people to hospital appointments but then I thought how much I don’t like driving in the dark and how that might not feel especially reassuring to vulnerable patients. Especially in West Sussex were most people seem to have at least one headlight broken so they drive around on full beam sending oncoming traffic hurtling into the ditch, a bit like the traffic pile up in Toy Story 2. Then there was the thought that a nervous patient might equally not love Beano in the car, dashing from one window to the other to bark pointlessly at dogs, squirrels and men in hi-viz. Then I was talking to my friend Troels, the legendary Danish baker and founder of Sødt and he suggested we went to have a look at the local community garden in Petworth. I went for a visit and a tour and was blown away by what they achieve there.

It was originally set up as a means of providing local families in need of support and food parcels, with fresh organic vegetables. But it has grown into an extraordinary cohesive and life affirming organisation - a community group working with a mixture of older people, children, adults with learning difficulties, people with physical, mental, family or social challenges, and other interested locals, and working together in a group. Once a week the men’s shed group meet and make wonderful small wooden things like bird boxes. There are wheelchair-accessible paths and raised beds; the garden has been created on an organic and Permaculture basis and on the presumption that people of very different skills and energy levels will be working in it. When I was there a group of four or five women were weeding a bed and I promise you, as one of them said, they were like locusts sweeping across a field, so thoroughly was the bed cleaned. They work on a no dig basis too, so as not to stir up more weeds than necessary, and I finally learnt what a Mare’s Tail looks like.- I remember when Soph’s garden was plagued with it and we weren’t sure what the beastly thing was. The community garden now has a brilliant compostable loo, using shovelfuls of wood shavings and they have recently built a new shed and a spanking new kitchen where they hope to make the jams and chutney that they sell at the local market. This may be where I come in, although I’d be just as happy dealing with the bind weed outside as making rhubarb jam inside.

Obviously, the whole point of volunteering is that you are thinking of other people and not about yourself. It's not about me me me but ideally about you and you and you. Having said that, I particularly appreciate the idea of volunteering somewhere where I know nobody and nobody yet knows me.

Petworth was recently named by the Sunday Times as one of the best places to live in the south-east of England. ‘A chichi Sussex Village with a serious social scene and art to rival the capital.’ Indeed. I'm ashamed to say I hadn't really known about the food parcel side of this area but the community garden provides twice weekly deliveries to families who need them including donations from the local co-op and bread from so. Even in my very short visit I could feel the palpable atmosphere of positivity, safety, inclusiveness and if that doesn't sound too old-fashioned – goodness. To help in whatever way possible will be a joy and a privilege.

Mary Bennet

I’m in mourning having finished The Other Bennet Sister on BBC iplayer. I too have never been sure about writers’ taking and putting their own spin on other people’s books and characters, but that was before Janice Hadlow’s book came along and thence the 10-part series, set in Wales. A heroine in glasses! Ella Bruccoleri is endearing and perfect. At each point in the storyline where there might have been the temptation to slide into slapstick or go for a cheap laugh, it has pitched it exactly right and has stayed on the right side of heartwarmingly funny. And no spoilers, but the conversation between Mary and Mr Collins is complete genius.

The dreaded council check

As I write, I'm waiting for the inspector to come from the environmental health department of the local council to do my kitchen check. Which is what you have to have if you make food for sale on your own premises, although at least with marmalade there are fewer hoops to be jumped through than there would be with something like chicken pies or fish or anything involving allergens. I had been wondering why the inspectors seem to have disappeared out of my life – the last check was in 2017. It's fair to say that I am probably not the sort of person that daily cleans the handles and the panels of my kitchen cupboard doors, and my skirting boards, with a toothbrush but this week I have been that person. According to a friend who also gets council checks, they like to find three things. I remember that last time they wanted me to get a pedal bin, not to chop oranges under the beam in the kitchen in case mysterious weevils might drop into the pan, and to make sure all my paperwork was spit spot and up-to-date. I've done all those so it will be interesting to see what the three things are today.

Because I couldn't face it myself, for the first time ever I looked up and found a firm called Oven Wizards HERE to clean my oven and I'm completely sold. A charming man called Clive came and spent two hours scraping unspeakable stuff from the inside of my oven, mostly lying on his back on the floor. He didn't even mind when Beano, assuming that if he was just lying on the floor like that he had nothing better to do than throw a ball, kept dropping a rubber ball onto his groin.

Gosh, it’s all kicking off in the columns of the Daily Telegraph; I thought the Daily Mail were the market leaders in clickbait, but this week the Telegraph has had their readers rushing to their laptops, tearing their hair out and spitting feathers, all at the same time. They ran a piece about the head of the National Trust, Hilary McGrady, entitled ‘Ethnic minorities don’t know what to wear in the countryside’. Whoa, light blue touch paper and stand well back. You would think that the Daily Telegraph and the National Trust would be a good fit, but going by the comments beneath the piece they’re cancelling their membership in droves. Apparently the countryside is not welcoming to non-white people, as Hilary McGrady told LBC with the slightly muddled statement: ‘Everything from: it’s not culturally something that they necessarily feel as if it’s part of what they do when they go there.’

Honestly Hilary, I think that everybody - all of us of every ethnicity, knows that if it’s raining, you wear a raincoat but probably not if it’s sunny. To suggest otherwise seems a tiny bit patronising? When Soph and I visited Balmoral (not National Trust, I know, but still) two years ago, it was a noticeable how many Asian families there were walking round the grounds and clearly enjoying it just as much as we were. Probably more actually, because they didn’t have two annoying terriers with them. And you know what, we were all wearing what we called at school our ‘home clothes’, it was a bit windy and damp because it’s Scotland so some of us wore coats, and all was well! I quite often struggle with what I’m going to wear to London, but so far I’ve always managed to work it out and wear something and as long as people don’t point and stare, that’s completely fine.

The National Trust came into being in 1895, for the protection of historic sites and to preserve nature and history for the public to enjoy; the first purchase they made in 1896 was Alfriston Clergy House – a thatched 14^th century hall house. Beatrix Potter was a big fan and a friend of one of the founders of the National Trust, Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, a clergyman and conservationist who was known as the ‘Defender of the Lakes’. On her death in 1943 she left the Trust 14 farms, including her beloved Hill Top, and 4,000 acres.

I think it’s fair to say that since those days there have been changes within the National Trust. Membership is falling, as are the numbers of volunteers, and one of the bones of contention has been how colonial history is presented. The Slavery Abolition Act was eventually passed in the UK in 1833 although William Wilberforce and others had founded the London society for the abolition of the slave trade way back in in 1787. Wilberforce was a philanthropist and social reformer from Yorkshire for whom the drive to end slavery became his life’s work. When he spoke to the Houses of Parliament in 1791, he ended by saying ‘Having heard all of this you may choose to look the other way but you can never again say you did not know.’ Wilberforce died three days after the Abolition act was passed. I promise you, Hilary, every right-minded person knows that slavery was a vile and abhorrent thing; there is no need to keep beating us over the head with it.

If you can get past the DT paywall, read Charles Moore on how the Trust is re-educating its workforce HERE. In one of the comments under Charles’ piece someone called Allan Griffiths responded with an extract from a robust letter cancelling his National Trust membership:

‘You have but one task, which was entrusted to you by an Act of Parliament in 1907 and in several subsequent Acts and that is “promoting the permanent preservation for the benefit of the nation of lands, and buildings, of beauty or historic interest and lands for the preservation so far as practical of their natural aspect features and animal and plant life”. Closing buildings to the public, firing expert curators and generally “dumbing down”, does not seem to us to be consistent with the performance of that task.’

I’ll tell you what most people want when they visit a National Trust property: they want to admire the architecture, walk in the park, look at the lovely furniture and china, and particularly the old kitchens. We enjoy an old kitchen. Drawing rooms and bedrooms – well, they have beds and sofas and chairs, but we all have those, they’re just much grander. But it’s those old kitchens (with their high windows so that the manservants couldn’t look in at the maids) where we really get a sense of history and hopefully come away feeling inspired by the gorgeousness and grateful for our dishwashers and refrigerators.

Then they want to go and have a nice cup of tea and a piece of home-made shortbread, well most of us do, and perhaps buy something in the gift shop? (Years ago one of my children had a pencil from the gift shop of one of those Scottish statelies, maybe Manderston because we were their tenants; the pencil had a little figure on the top wearing a See You Jimmy hat and it played Scotland the Brave. The terrier we had then, called Tadpole, lost his mind over that tune and made it his mission to seek out and destroy the offensive Scotsman and his See You Jimmy hat, which he eventually achieved, as terriers do.) Anyway Hilary, what I’m saying is that you might be overthinking this head of the National Trust business. Nurture the properties, cherish the volunteers and give the members a jolly day out.

By the way, a splinter group has formed called Restore Trust, whose aims are to revert to the original National Trust values; you can read about them HERE.

What is Hilary’s stance on moles? I think we should be told. There was a story in the DT readers’ comments about a room in a National Trust house having to be closed one day because of a wasp: not because of the danger of someone’s being stung but because of the sensibilities of spectators if the wasp were to get swotted pass away. I imagine that the gardeners in National Trust properties take pride in the velvety smoothness of the lawns and don’t take kindly to a row of untidy molehills. What measures do they take?

When a hillwalker called Simon Lucas recently posted on social media a photograph of dead moles strong along a wire fence, which was historically the mole catcher’s slightly grisly way of advertising his skill, like the old gamekeepers’ gibbets, he received an avalanche of comments. It’s a tricky one, isn’t it? Moles are strangely appealing and do not seem on the face of it particularly harmful vermin, but to those who are proud of their lawns they’re a menace and farmers despair when molehills ruin machinery or fill up bales of hay or silage with big clods of earth.

They are phenomenal diggers. They can dig out 10kg of soil in twenty minutes with their shovel-like forearms - one hundred times their body weight. Then they backtrack along their tunnels and hoover up the earthworms and the leatherjackets that have dropped down; quite a neat system. The Romans used to catch moles by burying earthenware jars full of water. Back in the day there used to be things called Mole Smokes (Mole goes into corner shop: ‘Twenty Mole Smokes and a copy of the Sporting Life, please’) The one time I have sought out the advice of a mole catcher (he didn’t catch one but he was impressed when Beano did) he admitted that although it was his livelihood, he rather liked and admired moles. Beano also likes moles but in a different way.

Something strange ran across Beano’s path out in the field early one morning this week. It wasn’t a badger or a fox or a muntjac, but it was dark coloured, quite big and fast and shot away from him towards the river. Ten minutes later I read in the papers a report of the Hampshire capybara called Samba which has gone missing from Marwell Zoo in Hampshire. Feeling a bit silly I rang the helpline, but they thought I was too far away. I still don’t know what it was. Beaver? Otter? I’m just relieved that it was Beano who saw it and not Dennis because Beano gives up the chase quite easily and canters back to me looking embarrassed, whereas Dennis would’ve followed it all the way to the river and then gone in after it. Probably all the way to the sea.

More history

I’m late to podcasts, but I am loving The Rest is History and becoming hooked on the (apparently) easy discursive conversations between Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook and how lightly they wear their knowledge. Some excellent gags. I was going to say I wish I’d had a history teacher like that, but actually I did have an enthusiastic history teacher called Miss Breen. But history was taught in very small random slices in those days: one term it might be the Tudors, another it would be Iron Age man without any visible thread between them.

I have to admit that I haven’t entirely got the hang of the Rest is History app, in that it seems very difficult when you’ve listened to episode two of Churchill, for example, to then find episode three whilst still driving along (what I mean is when I’ve pulled over, obviously) and then it turns out that the one you want is for subscribers only (I’m not quite there yet, but I’ll crack soon). So my listening turns out to be a bit random: one minute it’s General Gordon, then Boswell and Dr Johnson, the next it’s Emma Hamilton and Nelson in Naples so that I end up thinking was it Mrs Thrale who said that, or was it Emma Hamilton? But does it really matter, I’m not taking an exam. I loved hearing how needy Nelson could be, and how he adored a bit of bling. And how endearing is Dr Johnson, with his strange twitching mannerisms and his habit of putting orange peel in his coat pockets? (That may have been quite sensible of him because as we know clothes moths hate the smell of citrus). On the back of the podcast, I've now bought the biography: I particularly like the moment when Johnson, who did love his food, said after a particularly plain dinner: ‘ This was a good dinner enough, to be sure; but it was not a dinner to ASK a man to’. And Boswell who wants to be a better more religious person but is disastrously drawn to prostitutes, one of whom asks him for the loan of two guineas. (‘Red flag’, says Tom).

So far I’ve been skipping past the Incas every time they come up on the list, honestly I can’t be doing with the Incas, but I dare say on the next long car journey I’ll give in and become a massive expert and tell you all about them.