DIARY
NICHOLAS COLERIDGE Since last I wrote this diary I have got married, and ten weeks into it my only domestic problem is having a house too small to store the many wedding presents we have been given. So, until we move, we are camping between piles of cardboard boxes containing tumblers, casserole dish- es, bath mats and wooden towel rails. In the Fifties, I gather, the most popular wedding present was the toast-rack, until this was overtaken by the pop-up toaster. Nobody gave us a single toast-rack or pop-up toaster but we did receive four splendid asparagus steamers: tall, thin saucepans made of stainless steel with special narrow baskets inside to hold the stalks. I mentioned to a friend, also recent- ly married, that four asparagus steamers seemed almost too much of a good thing, but she told us we had got off lightly. When she married last December she and her husband were given 57 photograph frames and 34 cache-pots. I assumed she was exaggerating, but she insisted not. They had 400 to the wedding, and people who give photograph frames tend to give a pair of them, so it only took about one in 15 guests to have that particular brainwave to add up to 57 frames. 'Where have you put them all?' I asked. 'Oh, we were incredibly lucky,' she replied, perhaps a trifle unsen- timentally, `while we were away on honey- moon we were robbed. They must have had a van, because they got away with almost all our presents.'
y wife, as I am getting used to describing her, recently went to a Friday night 'hen party' for a childhood friend who was getting married. The evening began with dinner for 20 at Monkeys restaurant in Chelsea, then moved on to Tramp nightclub. This was her first visit to Tramp and she was interested to see in the queue outside not only a host of quite famous pop stars and footballers but the Editor of the Sunday Times, Mr Andrew Neil, with a brace of beautiful Asian girls on his arm. Last week we went to a party at George Weidenfeld's flat to mark the publication of Nigel Dempster's new biography of Christina Onassis. Here also was Andrew Neil who, on being intro- duced to Georgia, said `Haven't we met somewhere before?' Not really,' she re- plied brightly, 'but I did happen to be next to you in the queue at Tramp recently.' :Which night was that?' asked Neil, bring- ing his full expertise into play. 'Friday? That's a very bad night at Tramp. So are Thursdays and Saturdays. You should al- ways go on Monday, Tuesday and Wednes- day for a good time at Tramp.' Some months ago Peregrine Worsthorne wrote a classic leading article about the editor's place being, not in a nightclub, but at the
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Athenaeum having dinner with an octogenarian Nobel prizewinner. But I can only marvel at Mr Neil's energy, though six nights at Tramp is the one fate that sounds worse to me than a lonely dinner with a nuclear physicist at the Athenaeum.
Some friends in Wiltshire were recently burgled while they were out having lunch with neighbours. The burglar had shinned up a drainpipe, entered through a bath- room window, and spent an hour or so taking his pick. His pick included clearing the entire contents of their safe, the key to which he had come across in a desk drawer marked 'Safe' along with another smaller key marked 'Mower'. The Warminster police arrived swiftly, reckoned they had a fair idea who'd done it (there being only a handful of cat burglars in the area) and promptly arrested the prime suspect who, sure enough, had all the stolen bits and pieces hidden in his house. Our friends' troubles were not over, however. None of the stolen property can be returned to them until the trial which is not scheduled for another six months, in case the burglar changes his plea from guilty to not guilty and the jury need to be shown the booty as evidence. Might they, they asked, be allowed their two large suitcases back, which the burglar had used to carry their stuff away, since they were going on holiday to France the next week and wanted to use them? Sorry, said the police, it can't be done. What, then, about the little key to their lawnmower? Surely that wasn't substantive evidence, and the old mower can't be started without it. Again the police are playing it by the book. Perhaps they are getting their own back on our friends for an embarrassing moment during the identification of the stolen goods. Virtually everything, of course, they could recognise at once. But a large case of silver fish knives and a massive silver salver meant nothing to them. In- deed, they mildly objected to the fish knives being thought theirs, on Mitfordish grounds. 'And we've certainly never seen that awful ornate silver plate before,' they declared. 'Well, that's odd, sir,' replied the policeman, 'since your name is written on
it.' The salver was a leaving-present on his departure as British ambassador to Vene- zuela, engraved with the grateful thanks of the entire Venezuelan foreign office; so ugly, they had never fully unwrapped it in the intervening 15 years. Insult was recent- ly further added to injury by the news that the burglar had been given special dis- pensation by a local magistrate to have his BMW back. The car was impounded by the police after his arrest, since it was used as the getaway vehicle in the burglary, but since he has pleaded guilty there are no grounds for hanging on to it.
Still on the subject of wedding presents, we needed to send something to a couple who got married in the spring and live on a farm in Devon. At the time we couldn't decide what to buy for them, so bought them nothing, an easy solution. But hear- ing that they have a duck pond and no ducks, we decided that a pair of Ayles- burys would fit the bill. Our part of the Cotswolds is a convenient place to buy ducks, since the whole area has lately sprouted with duck farms and rare breed centres selling every imaginable variation of Indian runner ducks and Lantau geese, elegant, blousy and inbred. The owner was delighted to sell us two Aylesburys and offered to Red Star them right away in a cardboard box to Okehampton railway station. The price for the ducks was £70. It seemed a lot, but I didn't click quite how much until later when we wandered into a local hotel and saw roasted Aylesbury duck, on the blackboard for £7.95 includ- ing vegetables, orange salad and VAT. Were the £70 ones a particularly rare kind of Aylesbury duck, I asked a neighbour, more countryish than I? 'God, no,' he laughed. 'These duck farms are a great joke round here. They rely on people not having a clue, so invent their own prices. Just so long as you didn't buy any!'
We returned from shopping in Cir- encester on Saturday to find a thrilling note jammed in the letter box: 'Come for a fly,' it said in large capital letters. 'Ring me on my Vodaphone and I'll come and collect you.' Our host was an American, the chairman of Harvey Nichols, who has only recently got his licence but flew us safely over the Cotswolds from Malmesbury to Chipping Norton and then west to Cardiff. The view was a revelation. Far from being all roads and roundabouts, as it appears at ground level, the country remains 99 per cent fields. A great relief. I need not vote Green for several elections yet.
Nicholas Coleridge is Editorial Director of Conde Nast Publications.
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