Читать книгу The Lost Diaries - Craig Brown, Craig Brown - Страница 37

February is the month I devote to rearranging the cushions on the sofa in my dressing room, and I do so without any help whatsoever from our staff. As you might imagine, it is quite a job, there being no fewer than four cushions, each of a different colour. Thus one might choose to arrange the navy blue on one side, the pink on the other, with pale yellow and Lincoln green somewhere in the middle, only to find that, on second thoughts, it actually looks better to have the pink somewhere in the middle, with the pale yellow to the left, the navy blue to the right, leaving room for the Lincoln green to remain in the middle, only this time next to the pink and not to the pale yellow, unless of course it is between the pink and the pale yellow.

Whenever I have met them, I have found the British public extraordinarily ignorant of the demands and pressures with which we in the so-called ‘upper classes’ (how I hate all this ‘class’ nonsense!) are confronted day by day. I sometimes think that the ‘ordinary’ people, for all their immense pluck, fail to appreciate the many onerous tasks that befall the Stately Home owner, and I welcome this opportunity to ‘put them in the picture’. Rearranging the cushions on the sofa in my dressing room is one such task, and the time and planning involved are not to be underestimated. First, I have one of our staff nip out to the local shops to buy me a range of excellent new French devices known as ‘crayons’, which are what we used to know as pencils, but with brightly coloured leads. I then spend a week or so measuring out on a piece of paper and colouring in four squares – pink, pale yellow, Lincoln green and navy blue – and a further week cutting them out. This leaves me just a fortnight to juggle these four coloured squares around this way and that, until I am perfectly satisfied that I have ‘come up’ with the best new arrangement. It all makes for a highly enjoyable topic of dinner conversation too, and come February our guests delight in spending an hour and a half or so over the soup arguing the pros and cons of, say, having the pink on the left or the pale yellow on the right, and thoroughly productive it is too.

ANDREW, DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE