Using serviettes for toilet paper

Now that I have kicked the squatters out, I feel rather lonely. I said how all your posts are neatly stacked one on top of the other again in my reading list, but I am somewhat disappointed in how few there are to read.

I am finally beginning to learn which of you has enabled 'comment moderation' and I avoid reading those ones because - as I said years ago - if I feel moved enough to leave a comment, I want it to print straight up. I don't want to go back to see if it meets with your approval a day later, so I never do. I don't want to feel the slight of it being ingored as unimportant either, so I never go back to see if I got a response if I do temporarily forget and leave a comment. I want instant gratification, but it seems a bit harsh to stop following someone because they vet all comments at their leisure.

Like Iris, I miss the style of the Hattatts, but not so much that I take them up on the offers of visiting them for afternoon tea, it seems. The trouble is that they are either at the other side of the country or out of it all together.

I have tried inviting them to Bath to take tea in the Pump Rooms with me, but I get the feeling that  - like a lot of people over the last 250 years - they think that Bath is ever so slightly vulgar. They are right, it is, but I have left it far too late to move somewhere else now. Having said that, they are a little older than me, I think, but they seem to embrace the excitement of moving to a new town and beginning a new life. Oh well, I hated change even when I was young.

With some people, the glamour rubs off by association in the same way that a person of previous good character may be turned into a criminal by spending time amongst seasoned ones in prison for a crime he did not commit.

Over the years I seem to have lost sight of the revelation that came to me when young - that if you pretend to be something for long enough, it becomes real. You become that thing which you pretended to be. I suppose this is how I lost sight of it.

This simple practice works very easily and quickly in the criminal world, but not in aristocratic circles.

When invited to spend the weekend with Lord and Lady So-and-So at their house in the country, one gives oneself away the very moment one opens one's mouth, no matter how cut-glass one's accent.

You might as well blurt out to your hosts on the doorstep of the house after a long drive from the suburbs, "Pleased to meet you I'm sure. Where is the toilet?" and get it over with.

There is a way of mixing well in all cirlces of life, and this is to be an Artist. Not just any old artist though, or - worse - someone who just calls themself an artist. You have to be an entertaining one. You have to sing for your supper in a good voice, and then you may be forgiven for calling napkins 'serviettes', or at least have the slip forebearingly overlooked.