Country life
My whip problem
Leanda de Lisle
Peter came back from the Newark Christmas Antiques Fair armed with a col- lection of swaggersticks and whips. They're very nice, I must say. The swaggersticks have silver tops engraved with the emblems of local yeomanry regiments. The whips include an ivory-handled 18th-century dog stick and a 19th-century crop that is, appar- ently, just the thing you need if you want to beat someone without leaving a mark.
'It's unbreakable. Look!' Peter demand- ed as he whipped the crop back and forth. 'Guess what it's made of?' An elephant's tail, I wondered, but didn't ask. 'It's a calf s Penis. They stretch it and stretch it and ...' suddenly I wished he would stop waggling it at me. 'It's certainly very long,' I told him. He found homes for his sticks on tables in various corridors. They look very country-house, but there's a part of me that longs for something different.
Like many country wives I nurture a secret desire for buff white walls, fashion- able gilded pots and glass tables with noth- ing on them. This part of me would like a 'cool yule'. A huge cactus sprinkled with fairy lights, instead of a Christmas tree weighed down with tinsel and baubles. A few simple 'accent' decorations instead of miles of holly sprayed with glitter. I wish I had a flat in London in which I could express this. And not having one is particu- larly boring when there are so many parties to go to and so few places to stay. We went to a dinner-party on Saturday — the first time we'd be in London over a weekend for about ten years, and it was a nightmare. The centre of town was blocked with coachloads of day-trippers from the coun- try and we arrived late and exhausted at our hotel in Knightsbridge. It was one of those upmarket bed and breakfasts favoured by many in our situation. You get a small bedroom, ensuite bathroom and tap water to put by your bed.
Peter, who had been shooting all day, was desperate to have a snooze before his bath, but to our horror the woman at the desk told us that they had double-booked our room and they were pushing us off to another hotel. I was livid, although Peter was strangely good-tempered. I can only suppose that he was crazed with exhaus- tion. The new hotel was more upmarket than the one we had booked into but the receptionist in Knightsbridge assured us that they had arranged a special rate for us to match their own. I happened to know, however, that there is never anywhere to park near this hotel, so I had to force them to send a boy out into the rain to find us a cab. He took for ever, but we eventually got our bed for the night. The next day we paid our bill only to find that we had been charged some vast sum for our breakfast. As this Labour government will discover, we country folk are sick and tired of being pushed around. I made a point of going back to our original hotel when we collect- ed our car. I didn't make a scene but I gave them what my nanny used to call `ein look' and told them I expected them to pay for our orange juice and croissants. They didn't hesitate for long.
We returned home with a packed sushi lunch we had bought in Harrods. The shop assistant had kindly covered them with ice to stop them going off in the car, but, unfortunately, when we opened them we discovered that they had been frozen solid. I may love clean, modern things but they don't seem to travel well — at least not up the Ml.
Looking around me, I wonder whether I'm destined to live out my days like a lat- ter-day Miss Haversham, eating illegal ribs of beef, surrounded by redundant whips and swaggersticks, as if nothing had changed since May 1997, or, indeed, Christmas 1887. A part of me hopes not, but, more worryingly, another part hopes
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