We had an extremely enlivening morning. One of the projects currently on the boil is the rehabilitation of a dreary patch of weed sycamores, half-hearted car-parking and general mess immediately proximate to some of the university’s more formal and important buildings which would, in the view of the Northern Professor, be infinitely better as a […]
We are engaged in a great deal of organisation at the moment. At any one time, at least one person in the house is trying to finish a book, so it is easy for domestic matters beyond the day-to-day to disappear vanishingly beneath anyone’s list of priorities. Therefore, for the last few years, we […]
I have finally completed the painting of the Professor’s studiolo, which has been something of a long haul. Phase one was a painting of Holy Wisdom enthroned, which was begun by the Last Whig in Captivity about seven years ago, finished by me a year later with the aid of Peter’s cousin, and mounted on […]
Miss Best Friend was faced with an agonizing dilemma last night: on the one hand, I was in the kitchen, dissecting the bone out of a half-leg of lamb, a procedure of the keenest interest to her since she is an old jackal at heart and passionately fond of raw bones: as I was […]
I have finished the draft of the current novel, a fact which reveals to me, thought this has doubtless been apparent to the rest of the household for some time, that I have been living in a state of mania and denial for some time. A tsunami of neglected this and that is crashing […]
One piece of news we have not as yet shared with the blogosphere is that the Apparitional Gamekeeper has taken the Queen’s shilling, or 5p, perhaps one should say. We weren’t sure how he would take to it, but he has just returned from his first week of basic training, and the words ‘duck to […]
As time has gone by, we have found ourselves increasingly identifiable within an existing type, crisply defined by one of the thousand-odd direct descendants of Hilaire Belloc, great contributors to the breed: ‘let’s face it. We’re all posh hippies’. One defining category of posh-hippydom is engaging in quite elaborate buildings and works, substituting ingenuity, and […]
The Management apologises for an interruption in transmission. We got back from London all right (limping, in the Lady Novelist’s case: she had been suffering for her art in the Tower of London). Since then there haven’t quite been enough hours in any one day. She is locked in battle with the twelfth […]