On Saturday night I went to Charlie’s 69th birthday party. What a gaff he’s got. The rather snooty description of the Grade II listing sums the place up as ‘a slightly provincial but nonetheless interesting example of an early to mid 18th-century gentleman’s house which has a remarkably complete interior and has not suffered from any extreme 20th-century modernisation’. The writer is quite correct: inside the house, apart from the telly and the odd iPad lying about, George I might still be on the throne, poaching a capital offence, and John Wesley fervently preaching to multitudes in a field just outside the parish bounds. You can look out of any window and the views are the same as then, too.
I peaked early and was sick on his gravel drive at about 11 o’clock. Four massive gins, goodness knows how many glasses of red wine, new potatoes, and a leg of duck. But after that I got my second wind and come the end I was one of the diehards sitting around a 19th-century table in his 18th-century kitchen drinking last year’s brandy.
One of the company (I was told later) had been shot in the back of the neck by a sniper and the bullet had exited via his mouth. After that he had dealt in antiques. He seems to have suffered no ill effects from the incident. So there was a conversation about antiques. It was all far above my head, but I was included in it because my alcoholic paralysis was mistaken for absorbed interest. And then there was a conversation about the supernatural, particularly the unexplained events that have been occurring for years in the rooms above our heads. Something uncanny has occurred in virtually every upstairs room in the house.
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