You Can’t Get The Staff

The explorer, Robin Hanbury-Tenison, was on the front page of The Times yesterday. He caught Covid-19 on a skiing holiday and nearly lost his life. Thanks be to God, he is at home with his wife in Devon and will celebrate his 84th birthday tomorrow.

I have heard him talk at the RGS with his wife, Louella, about their trek riding along the Great Wall of China and he sometimes hunted with the Louth when he was growing up in Co Monaghan. I feel rather old as I don’t know him but remember his mother. She bred Labradors and was a friend of my grandfather’s. She always sketched a Labrador on the back of the Christmas card envelope she sent him. Her name is Ruth but my mother and grandparents had another friend, Rosebud. I have noticed many headstones in the cemetery with the names of flowers: Tulip, Violet, Rose. My godson’s sister is called Poppy, I knew a cherished Lily and my sister-in-law is called Rosemary but they seem to have been prevalent in the 19th century.

In Last Days in Old Europe Richard Bassett recalls –  Countess Korwin saying “You know how difficult it is these days to find … Personal. “ This last word the Gräfin pronounced in the Austrian upper-class nasal manner as ‘Perr-so-naal’. A temporary shortage of servants was responsible for the untidiness. Marta and I smilingly acquiesced in this happy fiction which the manners of old Austria made easy to accept.

I need a haircut and a cleaner but ‘twas forever thus. “It was in this year that my uncle began to break in upon the regularity of a clean shirt – to dismiss his barber unshaven.” (The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy)

Of course everybody ought to have a maid. In order of appearance: Simon Russell Beale, Daniel Evans, Julian Ovenden and Bryn Terfel at Stephen Sondheim’s 80th birthday party at the 2010 Proms.