The other weekend the Fawn and I were invited to stay at Chilham Castle. Obviously, if you’re Charles Moore, this is no big deal because it’s the kind of thing you do 24/7, 365 days of the year. For us, though — me especially, the Fawn being slightly posher than me — it was a revelation. ‘Bloody hell!’ I thought. ‘This is totally fantastic. Why isn’t my life like this all the time?’
And I found myself wishing dear Hugh Massingberd were still alive. He would have understood perfectly when I rang him up to boast. Private Eye called him ‘Massivesnob’ but as Hugh knew snobbery has little to do with it.
You don’t need to be grand to land an invitation to one of the great English (or Scottish) houses. Just interesting. Or funny. Or beautiful. Or soundly right-wing. Or crazily eccentric. Or a writer. Or a decent bridge player. Or whatever special quality your hosts think you might have to help make the most interesting and pleasant social mix for that weekend. It’s an art form — perhaps the greatest of all English art forms. And it all centres on the most important thing of all: the great house itself, whose splendour, beauty, history and sheer delight its generous owners are determined to share with as many like-minded folk as they can muster.
Alternatively, there’s always Downton Abbey (ITV1, Sunday). I said Hugh wasn’t snobbish, which is true up to a point. But one thing he was very hot on was any kind of ahistoricism or social solecism or capitulation to popular ignorance, and I’m sure he would have sat down in front of his TV, pen and paper in hand, ready to scrawl in his illegible script the more egregious examples.
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