Admired all the handsome trees on the approach.
Passed on the festive choir in the tent and so started off by snapping the water tower, an imposing brick structure intruded into the rather older stable block in around 1904. Was the driver the need to be able supply running hot & cold to house guests?
Rather a handsome tower, which I rather preferred to the more quirky, more Italianate water towers built for the mental hospitals of the Epsom cluster, probably not that many years previously. I puzzled about the function of the iron brackets below the eaves, iron brackets which were far too flimsy to carry a balcony. Maybe I will ask a trusty one day.
The café next to the choir had looked both crowded and noisy, so we opted for the main cafeteria in the stable yard, where we learned from one of the young men there that the catering staff were proper employees of the National Trust, rather than of some catering contractor. It seemed a bit impertinent to ask about zero hours, although given that quite a lot of the staff were either at school or at college, zero hours for them might suit everybody.
Next up was the festive horse and charabanc, hired for the occasion and with its large horse box taking up some of the disabled space in the car park. To be illustrated.
We had thought that we would ask all the trusties we could catch to sign our copy of 'Façades', last noticed at reference 2. It might have capped, in an amusing way, the collection of Sitwell memorabilia in the house. But in the end, I decided that I lacked the panache to carry such a thing off with any style.
The decorations turned out to mean Christmas trees in every room, not particularly attractively decorated, and trusties dressed up in 1930's clothes, real or replica. We have been told in the past that they take being in costume fairly seriously, with some of them being 1930's from the skin up. Stays and all that sort of thing. Some of them looked rather cold.
I had forgotten that some of the rooms are quite grand, some of them with fancy ceilings. And there are a lot of quite decent paintings, if not exactly masterpieces, including one sketch by Carel Fabritius, the chap last noticed eighteen months ago at reference 3. Plus, tucked in among the stodgy histories and sermons, a collected George Eliot and a collected Tolstoy, probably leather bound to order.
Over this morning's porridge, we wondered how events like Mrs. Greville's Christmas Party found their way onto the Court & Social pages of serious newspapers. Did she have to send in copy for their consideration? Did the society correspondents of said newspapers bribe staff at the houses of the great and the good across the land? Did she have to invite people who were close enough to being journalists, without actually being from Grub Street, who could be relied on to do the necessary? People like her regular guest, Osbert Sitwell?
Not making much progress with that one, we moved onto wondering about what sort of people, people who were eligible that is, would have wanted to go to such a party, given that I don't think either she or her husband had much in the way of family, at least not anywhere near London. Most married people, even from the upper classes, even then, would have had their families to attend to. Young people of the right sort, but without family, would probably have preferred to stay in town. So who did that leave? Did she usually retire to her villa in Nice or wherever?
Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/polseden.html.
Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/facades.html.
Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/tartt-failure.html.
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