Net loss

The scene is a drawing-room at nightfall. A group of weekenders sit in time-honoured tradition around a crackling fire. One is engrossed in a magazine; another chats with her boyfriend; the rest debate whether the word ‘zapateado’ is permissible in their board game. But this is not a house party as Terence Rattigan knew it: the magazine is being read on an iPad; the lovers are exchanging endearments by text message; the game-players have swapped the Scrabble set for a laptop with access to Wordscrape. New technology is tightening its grip on our lives, and not even the country house weekend is immune.

The CHW was once a little pocket of days isolated from normality; a stage on which a hostess could play at being director, choosing an amusing cast of characters and watching them flirt and scrap. It wasn’t always a walk in the Humphrey Repton park. For every natural guest happy to bob along like Bertie Wooster on a current of chit chat there would be another — humiliated on the croquet lawn or peeved at not getting the best bedroom — whose weekend was given over to plotting revenge.