Like Bertie with a bone, I’m reluctant to leave Patrick O’Brian. His stepson is Count Nikolai Tolstoy and his eldest daughter is Countess Alexandra Tolstoy-Miloslavsky. May I digress?
You probably had a good laugh yesterday at PO’Bs opinion of Irish peers but they don’t proliferate like continental titles. Alexandra’s three siblings are Counts and Countesses. I am not jealous in the slightest; it’s a regime that debases the currency. Her chosen surname “Tolstoy-Miloslavsky” needs amplification. She was married to an Uzbek equestrian, Shamil Gamilzyanov, but the son she bore him it transpired was sired by Russian businessman, Sergei Pugachev, so no clue to her adopted name. She has chosen her great-great grandfather’s surname – the first Count Tolstoy – but I doubt she uses it online as it’s too long.
My interest is because I saw a wonderful BBC documentary about her. Unfortunately, much can be conveyed in a film which, if shared here, would get me more than a wigging from a Richmond policeman. Her Wikipedia entry cites in 2009 she engaged highly paid lawyers to protect her private life. I wonder why she subsequently invited a TV camera crew to share her private life?
Early in the film she shows off her collection of designer shoes, oblivious to the Imelda Marcos implication. There is something distasteful about conspicuous expenditure on luxury items. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the WeekendFT supplement How To Spend It. I look at the pictures but it is wholly irrelevant to my life. I warmed to their short-lived column: How To Give It.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t wear a hair shirt, especially since I found (sourced, in the modern argot) a local dry cleaner that’s open so I can wear cotton shirts again. I do, occasionally, waste money on expensive fripperies. I wonder if I had almost limitless money how I would behave?
Christopher, if you had limitless funds I am sure you would carry on as you do now; being generous to a fault with your friends, quietly dispensing charity where it is needed, choosing beautiful objects for your home that happen to also benefit some struggling artist or rug making commune and generally embodying the ideal of luxury in living, not luxury in having. Stay well. Xx W.
Friends of my sister-in-law whose surname is Byatt named their daughter Lettice. I don’t know whether they had in mind a future editorship of How To Spend It.