It is quite simple really: I pay money to a private contractor, a water company in this case, to provide me with clean, potable water and to take away and treat the sewage and grey water that I produce. It is a contract. I don’t want to hear the contractor’s sob story of how its Chief Executive is on the bread line with a £2M salary and having to sell the second Rolls, or how their bonus of £496,000 is inadequate for the jolly hard work that they do. I just want water, as agreed. What I don’t want is the same old climate change argument that this heat wave is all my fault and that the current drought has come about because the grubby public and I are using too much water. I will use whatever I want and I need; I am paying for it. The British Isles are in the temperate zone, with a generally moist climate; there is no shortage of water falling on these islands taken over a year, and the quantity has not changed in centuries. If all else fails, the islands are surrounded by water. What is needed is better use of the resources, better investment, and better maintenance of the infrastructure. Oh, and better oversight by HM government on the private companies to ensure that they do their jobs properly. It has been revealed that Thames Water’s desalination plant, built several years ago and the only one in Britain, still stands idle and has never been commissioned beyond the trial stage, presumably because of the running cost. Yet the company recently paid £2.8M as a “golden goodbye” to its Chief Executive when he was ousted for poor performance and a further £3.1M as a “golden hello” to the incoming CEO (the one on £2M a year). The current helpful advice from the company to its customers, having imposed a hosepipe ban, is not to wash themselves, but to wipe themselves down with a damp cloth. The phrase “let them eat cake” springs to mind or perhaps the company would like its customers literally to remain as “the great unwashed”. As it happens, my water supplier is Wessex Water, which has a very good reputation for efficiency and draws 75% of its water from aquifers in which there is no shortage of water. Demand for water in my region is actually down in comparison to dry periods in earlier years and no hosepipe ban is envisaged. Nevertheless, my general point still stands: I pay; you supply.
Having said all that, we should not be wasting water any more than we should be wasting energy or any other resource. The difficulty comes in defining ‘wasting’. I do not consider having a shower, or even a bath, to be ‘wasting’ water, but leaving a tap running in a public lavatory, for example (a not uncommon occurrence), is. In the future, our buildings could be better designed. Why do we use pure potable water to flush our lavatories? Why not use collected rain water or, perhaps, processed grey water from washing and bathing? Could we use a vacuum system that sucks away the sewage, using only a small amount of water to clean the pan? How much water is wasted running a tap until the water gets hot? In Finland they have a continuous circulating hot water system that ensures that the water comes out hot immediately. Having served in the Royal Navy I am well-versed in the need to conserve water. In ships, the water is extracted from the sea either by distilling or by reverse osmosis; the quantity extracted is finite. In steam ships, the water distilled has to be of a very high purity and its primary function is to replace water lost in the steam propulsion plant; water for personal use is a secondary consideration and would be rationed if necessary. If we took a shower at sea we wet ourselves all over, turned off the water, soaped ourselves down, then rinsed quickly. The Royal Navy has no steam ships left, other than nuclear submarines, but the same principle applies and fresh water is a precious commodity. Here in Shacklepin Towers we are doing our bit, though I do not consider us to be “Green” in any way, at least not politically. We usually flush the lavatories only once a day (“if it’s brown, flush it down; if it’s yellow, let it mellow” as quoted by Shearsmith and Pemberton in their Inside Number 9 comedy drama). We keep a bucket in the shower to collect the initial water that would otherwise be wasted when we wait for it to get hot. We now have a washbasin in the kitchen sink that collects stray water from rinsing china or hand-washing. We use this collected water on Jane’s precious garden or for flushing the lavatory, and it is surprising how much is collected that way. Stop rolling your eyes; as Kermit the Frog said in The Muppets, it’s not easy being Green.
You will gather from the previous two paragraphs that the UK remains in a heat wave, with clear skies and temperatures in the mid thirties a daily occurrence. It is absolutely lovely, though – perhaps – it could be a little cooler. We have implemented our ‘cool house’ policy, as described comprehensively in Blog 51, filling the house with cool air and sealing it in for the day early every morning. As a result, we have temperatures of only 23C inside when the air temperature outside is 35C. Mrs Shacklepin, believe it or not, wears the ubiquitous cardigan indoors and at breakfast time. A formal drought has been declared in some regions, though this has no legal significance other than re-emphasising to the public that water is short. Jane saw one customer at our local Lidl coming out of the supermarket with a shopping cart completely full with bottles of water and some supermarkets have decided to ration bottled water. Stand by for panic buying, though heaven knows why as the water coming out of our taps is pure, tasteless and entirely potable. A fool and his money are soon parted. The media, of course, fuels the paranoia by reporting these things, just as it did with the petrol shortages many months ago.
Life in the heat wave is, in some ways, similar to the lockdown imposed on us two years ago: it is so hot and so enervating that you are disinclined to do anything outside or to travel unnecessarily. Walking in the countryside (our usual recreation and exercise) is ‘out’ for us. Even sitting in the shade is uncomfortable and, after the initial euphoria of enjoying the sun, we have now taken to reading in the cool darkened drawing room or taking a siesta in the manner of those who live in the tropics. Jane thinks it is amazing that parents allow their children to play in the sun when it is at its peak, sometimes half naked and possibly without wearing sunblock. In the Caribbean, where she was born and spent her childhood, the family went to bed for a few hours in the afternoon and ate all their meals inside; barbecues were unheard of. The thing is, I suppose we British are so used to our summers being a washout that we still cannot believe that every day will be sunny, with no need to take an umbrella. Even after over a month of constant sun and no rain, you still see people sunbathing in the parks or on the beaches; it is as if they cannot believe their luck and want to make the most of it before the rain comes – and quite right too, for – make no mistake – this hot spell will not last forever. I seem to recall that, when we had the very prolonged heat wave in 1976, it ended with six weeks of heavy and continuous rain in September and beyond. Make the most of this, but be generous with the sunblock, drink lots of water and try to avoid the midday sun. Unless you are a mad dog or an Englishman, of course.
Jane is a member of our local Art Society and we signed up for their annual day trip to A Place of Artistic Interest. This year, the place (or rather places) of interest was Marble Hill in Twickenham, the artist J M W Turner’s country house across the road, and Frogmore Cottage on the Crown Estate at Windsor – this last, for a brief period, the home of the Meghan and her husband before they decided that California was much nicer. We duly mustered for the coach at 0800 in front of Melbury town hall and I eyed up our fellow passengers as one does the fellow patients in a doctor’s waiting room. The first thing I noticed was that they were all – how can I put this – of a certain age, which I suppose is understandable for a trip scheduled for a weekday. I muttered about going on a day trip with ‘the old people’ before Jane hissed at me to stop grumbling and look at myself in a nearby shop window. Oh. The second thing I noticed was their manner of dress: definitely a cut above, even for casual wear on a hot day, with not a pair of Sports Direct shorts, a baseball cap or a pair of trainers to be seen. Finally, I noticed the accents: cut glass vowels and not a yokel accent anywhere. This, I thought, is perfect: decent people, definitely pukka sahibs and PLUs: my kind of folk. I boarded the coach contentedly. I must say, buses have improved enormously since those rattle and bang, graunch and grind buses with ‘Royal Navy’ on the side that took us Naval Cadets from Dartmouth to expeditions on Dartmoor in 1969. This one had full air conditioning, smooth suspension, comfortable seats and a lavatory. The young driver wore a smart waistcoat, white shirt and tie. It was all very ‘executive’ and made the journey to Twickenham very comfortable, almost a treat.
Marble Hill House is a fine square mansion built on the banks of the River Thames at Twickenham by Henrietta Howard, the Countess of Suffolk. Her husband, the Earl, was – by all accounts – a drunken, adulterous and cruel man: a cad, in one word, and her marriage was both unhappy and debt-ridden. With considerable foresight, Henrietta realised that the childless Queen Anne, who was then on the throne, would be succeeded by the German House of Hanover and so she travelled to Germany and managed to ingratiate herself with Caroline, the wife of the soon-to-be George I. Her charm worked and she was recruited to the royal household as a lady-in-waiting, managing to have her husband recruited to George’s household at the same time. In due course, Caroline became Queen Caroline as her husband was crowned George I of England, and the family left Hanover. A sympathetic listener, Henrietta caught the eye of the Prince of Wales (soon to be George II) and became his mistress. She separated from her dreadful husband, but was unable to get a divorce in those days because it would have required an Act of Parliament. However, despite the separation, she did gain the title of Countess of Suffolk when her rake of husband succeeded to the title of Earl of Suffolk. After several years, George II decided to trade Henrietta in for a new model but, very decently, he settled a generous financial settlement on her, carefully entailing it legally so that her husband could not access it. She used the money to build Marble Hill in 1727, her husband died five years later, and she remarried the Hon George Berkeley with whom she enjoyed, at last, a very happy marriage. By all accounts Henrietta was a charming intelligent woman, good company and a popular socialite, and Marble Hill House hosted many intellectual visitors including Alexander Pope, Horace Walpole and John Gay. When Henrietta died in 1767 she was buried with her second husband at his family home, Berkeley Castle.
The house itself was designed in the symmetrical Palladio style, a very comfortable and handsome building built in white stone over three floors. One could almost imagine oneself living there until our guide pointed out that there were only five bedrooms, no kitchen and no bathrooms. A kitchen did exist at one time, but it had been knocked down over the course of history; a bathroom simply did not exist in those days: the nobility used chamber pots which were emptied by lesser mortals and disposed of God-knows-where (the river perhaps, or on the fields as fertiliser). And as to bathing, they bathed as infrequently as once a year and men shaved once a week – no one could claim that they wasted water in the eighteenth century. The roads at that time were so poor, impassable or plagued by highwaymen that parties of visitors to Marble Hill would invariably come by boat, the Thames being about 400 yards away. No-one knows why the house is called Marble Hill; the public park where the house stands is as flat as a pancake and there is no marble to be found anywhere nearby.
Turner’s House – Sandycombe Lodge – proved to be a tiny house designed and built by J M W Turner in 1813 as a country retreat for the artist and somewhere he could indulge in his favourite hobby of fishing. It has been very carefully restored after a prolonged period as a private residence, with many original features retained. Some of Turner’s paintings and sketches were on view, but I’m afraid I am not a fan and even the paintings of nudes proved unfathomable to me. I must be a Philistine. Our guide was very knowledgeable and gave us a comprehensive history of the house, but it really was very tiny, with only one living room, one and a half bedrooms (the ‘half’ currently used as a gallery) and – again – no bathroom. There was a small garden: it had once run to several acres, but the rest of the original plot and – indeed – the surrounding area, was now taken up with houses of the Victorian era. Sandycombe Lodge was worth a visit, especially if you were a Turner fan, but we were round there and out again before you could say “The Fighting Temeraire”; in any case, it was the designated lunch break on the tour and we wanted to get back to the café at Marble Hill before the rush.
Lunch was a disaster. The location of the café (an old stable block beside Marble Hill House) was good, but the choice in the small self-service café was abysmal and unclear. We could find no normal sandwiches on offer (unless you count quorn as normal) and, in the end, we settled for toasted cheese and ham sandwiches. This was a mistake: apparently there was a run on toasted cheese sandwiches (not surprising as there was little else to choose) and it would take twenty minutes to fulfil the order. So we sat and we sat, and we drank our ginger beers, and time passed by. Finally, after twenty five minutes we were summoned to collect our treats. We examined them incredulously. Mine comprised two slices of white bread, toasted only on the outside and containing a Kraft Cheese Slice of processed cheese and one slice of plastic ham, the cheese slightly warm. Jane, being dubious about the quality of the Cheddar cheese on offer for the sandwich had very carefully chosen Brie as her cheese filling, so hers was marginally better though the ham was no different from mine. We finished these cheeky little dainties in no time and Jane declared herself still hungry, but I was damned if were going to wait another half an hour for more food even if we had the time. I promised her an ice cream later if she was a good girl. Drained and unsatisfied, we dragged ourselves back across the baked and shrivelled park to our waiting coach with its air conditioning going full blast. Bliss.
Frogmore House in the grounds of Windsor Great Park, was the highlight of the tour. It is a substantial royal residence built in white stone over three floors and with ten bedrooms and was used for the wedding reception of Prince Harry and Meghan. It is still in use by the royal family, but can be visited in organised groups by appointment in August, and by the general public on designated “Charity Open Days”. Our guide was absolutely excellent: smart, knowledgeable and professional as – indeed – were all the staff there. The original Frogmore Estate (derivation: Frog’s Mere, the area having quite a high water table) was owned by Henry VIII and used for hunting. The house itself was built in 1684 for the nephew of Charles II’s architect (a good uncle to have), but was leased by the Duke of Northumberland, one of the many illegitimate sons of that randy so-and-so, Charles II. It was bought by Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, in 1792 as a country retreat: somewhere she could escape from the hurly burly of nearby Windsor Castle, and also somewhere she could take her daughters away from the temptations and wandering eyes and hands of the male court. Her daughters were employed in the sensible pastimes of embroidery, painting, drawing, reading and botany; the results of their expert embroidery may still be seen on the stairs carpet, and their very professional painting and knowledge of botany may be observed on the personally decorated walls. The eldest daughter, Augusta, inherited the house and lived there until her death in 1840. Queen Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent, then moved in and stayed until she died, the house thereafter being used by the royal family as an occasional residence ever since. One room in the house contains the dining table and other furniture and photographs from the Royal Yacht BRITANNIA, removed when the latter was decommissioned; it had a very pleasant masculine feel and bore the hallmark of the late Duke of Edinburgh, whose uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten, was born at Frogmore. The estate, which normally is closed to the public, is still much-used by the royal family as a quiet escape for exercise and reflection (it is about one mile from Windsor Castle). Queen Victoria’s Tea House stands nearby; it was built to provide refuge and refreshment to Her Majesty when she visited Prince Albert’s mausoleum and her mother’s mausoleum nearby to pray on a daily basis. We saw both mausoleums, but they are closed to visitors. Albert and Victoria’s Mausoleum, built in haste, is structurally unsound because of rising damp and attempts are currently being made to dry it out using constant-running central heating. Apparently, it may be some years before the building is dry enough to repair the brickwork, the plasterwork, the friezes and the decorations inside. Such repair will be funded by the royal family, not the public purse. Overall, Frogmore was well worth the visit and we learnt a great deal but, boy, did we bake: it was about 35C and the interior of the house was like an oven. That air conditioned coach home was very welcome and we staggered into Melbury at 2000, done to a turn. But what a day!
The hustings for the next leader of the Conservative Party and, therefore, the next prime minister continue apace and I, for one, am now heartily sick of it. Votes are being collected from signed up members of the party, estimated to be about 160,000 in number, so it makes no difference what the vast majority of the country wants. That is not to say that I disapprove of the election process, it is merely to say that the daily articles in my newspaper by each of the candidates are becoming so pointless that I no longer read them. In the red corner we have Rishi Sunak the former Chancellor of the Exchequer: son of Indian immigrants ejected from Africa who arrived in the UK virtually penniless, but made good; sent their son to a top public school (Winchester) where he flourished and went on to a top university (Oxford) then became a billionaire, a personable, intelligent man, good communicator and snappy dresser (even if he does wear brown shoes with a dark suit and his trousers are too short). As prime minister he would have us all wear hair shirts in order to balance the books after the huge debts incurred by lockdown. In the blue corner we have Liz Truss, the current Foreign Secretary: a Yorkshire lass who went to the local comprehensive school but, again, went on to Oxford university and became a politician who has held several cabinet posts; likeable, down-to-earth, attractive, but with less than ideal communication skills and a slightly grating accent. As prime minister she would cut taxes and borrow money to ‘prime the pump’ and get the economy going again: she promises that we can have our cake and eat it. Truss appears to be the current front runner, according to the press, but the media has no way of knowing which way party members will jump – even the number of members is unknown. Whatever.
Can a book harm you, other than by dropping on your head? The madness of ‘wokeness’ continues to entertain, with Aberdeen University still coming out on top. ‘Anything to do with France’ now appears to invoke a cautionary ‘trigger’ warning to undergraduates undertaking the university’s French module, with that nation’s entire colonial history, its experience of World War 2 and – of course – that bloody revolution when the proletariat chopped off peoples’ heads sending a shudder down the academics’ spines. Apparently the poor vulnerable students may feel threatened by the grisly stories to be imparted to them, hence the warning. Perhaps it would be better if the government sent letters to every person at the age of eighteen warning them that Life can be a very upsetting experience and that in the next sixty years or so they will see, read and hear things that will upset them, turn their stomachs, or generally make them feel unsafe; then we can have done with this trigger warning nonsense. I have recently bought a book published by the British Library as a reprint from the 1930s, a ‘who-done-it’ detective story of the type of which I am very fond. The foreword of the book comprises a warning by the publisher stating:
“The original novels and short stories reprinted in the British Library Crime Classics series were written and published in a period ranging, for the most part, from the 1890s to the 1960s. There are many elements of these stories which continue to entertain modern readers; however, in some cases there are also uses of language, instances of stereotyping and some attitudes expressed by narrators or characters which may not be endorsed by the publishing standards of today. We acknowledge therefore that elements in the works selected for reprinting may continue to make uncomfortable reading for some of our audience…the following stories are presented as they were originally published with the inclusion of minor edits made for consistency of style and sense, with pejorative terms of an extremely offensive nature partly obscured.”
Good grief. I am a mature adult. I know that our ancestors did horrible things in the past and I know that they wrote things that, today, might be considered offensive. It is to our credit that we are much better now and try to treat our fellow man with more respect. I do not need to be given a patronising warning before I open an old book. I am a grown up. I think that anyone who is offended or “feels threatened” by old literature should not bother reading it at all or, perhaps, see a psychiatrist. We already have a situation where at least ten major UK academic institutions have withdrawn over 1,000 books from their recommended reading lists or from their libraries in case “they harm or offend students”. Such books include the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dickens. Why not go the whole hog and burn them, like Hitler did? We are in danger of expunging our history and literature, and of bringing up generations of young people who think they have a right never to be offended or challenged; and the worst offenders are not the students themselves, but the very establishments that should be setting adult standards, such as universities and publishers. It would be laughable if it were not so tragic.
The first thing that seems to go out of the window in Britain when the weather is hot is sartorial standards and, let’s face it: there wasn’t much there to defenestrate in the first place. Jane and I went for lunch at The Ivy the other day, an up-market restaurant where the food is usually good and the service impeccable. The restaurant dress code is ‘smart casual’. As we enjoyed our special treat in this classy restaurant we gazed around at our fellow diners. One woman wore a vest and brightly striped pantaloons with flip flops as if she was taking a break from the circus; her male companion wore tight running shorts and espadrilles, as if he had just come off the beach. It got worse: at another table a tubby woman overflowed from a pair of Levi’s that were a size too small for her and her male companion wore a nylon football jersey complemented by baggy shorts with elasticated waist, and flip flops. I despair: does not a special occasion, dining in an expensive restaurant and attended by smartly dressed professional staff, demand a little effort on your part? And if a restaurant takes the trouble to state a dress code, should it not enforce it – otherwise, what is the point? I am not asking for white tie and tails here, just a smart shirt, trousers and shoes for men, with optional jacket and tie.
Of course one can, perhaps, go a bit over the top. Jane and I received curious glances as we strolled through Dartmouth for a celebratory birthday dinner at Taylor’s restaurant one evening last month. I had chosen my No 5W rig: the cream tropical suit, the pale blue Charles Tyrwhitt short sleeved shirt with Britannia Association tie, the casual stitched Italian shoes, the whole ensemble topped by the aviator’s sunglasses. It began to dawn on me, as I passed among the sports shorts, vests, bikini tops, bell tents and flip flops on The Embankment that I must be the only man in Dartmouth – nay in the whole of England’s south west peninsula – who was wearing a suit and tie. Who was this man with the attractive high-heeled woman on his arm, one could sense hoi polloi minds wondering? A millionaire ashore from his yacht for an evening in an expensive restaurant with his latest flame? A film star displaced from Monte Carlo?
Or was it the Man from Del Monte?
Hmm. Maybe skip the tie next time …’when ignorance is bliss’ and all that.
Keep drinking the water and remember: shower with a friend. Anyone care for a peach?
15 August 2022
"A Very Vintage Chap..." 