Today I make my bid for fogeydom by recommending to you an organisation called the Landmark Trust. Now of course holidays at this time of year should be about finding a small Swiss town overrun by teenagers from Battersea and dislocating your knee early enough to put in some decent drinking time in between folorn trips to the Musee D’Aplinisme and to the Pharmacy for painkillers. However, if you are in need of something more … er … sedate I can recommend staying in a Landmark Trust property. These are buildings of historic interest, impeccably maintained, that pay for themselves by being rented out to tourists. Some friends of ours were back from Washington and took a week in Goddards, a Luteyns building in Surrey. Goddards is a beautiful Arts and Crafts building. I hesitate to call it a house, what is the word for a building with 12 bedrooms, a skittle hall and dining room that could seat 40?
P and I own and Arts and Crafts style house in Wimbledon which we are in the process of redeveloping (Ruinous Project) so I spent a good part of my time photographing door furniture.
This in turn kept me out of the way of the 5 children under 6 who ran round the place screaming so loud that their lungs all but flapped out of their mouths. I have never managed to work out why evolution would make children behave in a way which makes their parents want to drive away and leave them behind in a supermarket. During the evening they went suddenly quiet and when nervous parents went to investigate they found that the children had taken the 600 odd toys and pieces of toys that they had brought with them and arranged them in careful lines forming concentric rectangles on the drawing room floor. It was undoubtedly impressive but also somehow disturbing in a Midwich Cuckoos sort of way.
The night was spent in serious conversation fuelled by port. Portraits of the original owners bobbed in the flickering candlelight, their pale Edwardian features frowning disdainfully at the appalling shite that middle aged middle class people tend to talk when they’ve had 3 wines too many and fancy themselves a foreign policy expert. I woke the next morning vaguely conscious that I had had a few things to say on the subject of religion but I wasn’t sure whether it was embarrassment or the hangover that had me wincing until 4 pm. The only relief was the garden. Outside it was cold and bright. Across the croquet lawn I could hear the Wood Pigeons and for a moment it was somehow the perfect quintessence of an English morning.
I’ve stayed in The Barn on Lundy – fabulous, as are all their properties on the island. Mind you, not a lot to do if you’re not a rock climber or a diver. And thank goodness the EU stopped them brewing their own beer on the island to sell in their own pub – it was called ‘Puffins’ Purge’. With more than a little justification.
Was it the cause or the product of the purge?