Came down with a heavy cold while I was staying in France but it’s getting better now. By a stroke of luck I’d slipped the perfect comfort reading into my bag and it much improved the homeward journey.
Many years ago, after a walk in the Cotswolds with Sandy Murray, we stopped at Swinbrook to look at the church where Nancy and Unity Mitford are buried and there are these magnificent reclining ancestors. There are two triple-deckers so it is worth the detour.
If I gave you a butterscotch early 1950s Fender Telecaster with a Gibson PAF humbucking pickup, what would you do with it? I might add, to make my theoretical gift more interesting, that it’s called Micawber.
Since last November George Lyttelton and Rupert Hart-Davis have been my companions at bedtime but all good things come to an end and I have come to the end of their letters. There are more than six hundred and they span some six years.
Mount Juliet is a mid to late 18th century house built by the 1st Earl of Carrick in Co Kilkenny. It was sold to the McCalmonts in 1914 and a ballroom was added in the 1920s.
A theme of the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis letters is R H-D’s prodigious appetite for reading and eating. Not surprisingly, he is writing around 1960, the best meals are abroad.
Today I’m going for a little-longer-than-usual walk; a fourteen-miler in Cambridgeshire to raise money for the Royal Marsden Hospital. It will be a doddle in comparison with The Ascent of Rum Doodle.