In Peru llama incest is common, but this is

Last Sunday I collected a waistcoat made from my own pet. From the same source came a hat, gloves, scarf, and a teddy bear wearing a little waistcoat of its own, though (saucily) no trousers.

A lady called Chan Brown, from Chesterfield, has organised this for me. I keep llamas, and she spins. She belongs to a group who call themselves the Spinsters and are sometimes to be found on a summer Sunday demonstrating their craft down at Cromford Mill, Joseph Arkwright’s magnificent and until recently neglected first mill, on the Derbyshire Derwent near Matlock Bath. The mill and its surroundings, which are beautifully situated, are being restored by a dedicated band of volunteers; there are things to see, refreshments to be taken and shops to browse in.

Cromford is the cradle of the Industrial Revolution and sacred or satanic ground (depending on your viewpoint): the beginning of the end of cottage industries. But I was too tactful to point this out to the Spinsters as I paid Chan for my beautiful chestnut-coloured waistcoat, my white bear, and my fawn and white gloves, scarf and hat, all in the softest llama wool from my own herd.

Ah, the joy of camelids. When some years ago I last wrote for The Spectator about my South American pets, our deft editor contrived to place my column right next to a full-page advertisement for a purveyor of elegant clothes, featuring a smart lady leading a handsome llama down a fashionable London street.

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The scene raised many questions (What was a woman like that doing with a llama? Was it hers? Why was she taking it for a walk in the city? Where did it actually live? Did she have a pooper-scooper to clear up the droppings from the pavement?) but it illustrated my article even more neatly than the editor realised, for the model (the llama, not the lady) was a close relative of my stud llama, Knapp; in fact he was Knapp’s uncle.