In the hall at Aberglasney — a fine, classical country house, built in 1720, 20 miles north-west of Swansea — high up by the cornice, an elaborate chunk of plasterwork is missing. To give the full catalogue entry, it is a rococo console, carved with twirling honeysuckles, a motif dear to the ancient Greeks.
I know, to my deep and lasting shame, where to find it. In fact I can see it now, on a mahogany stand next to my desk. Its protuberant plaster leaves provide a nice perch for my keys where I don’t forget them. For all its usefulness as a key perch, the console would look better glued back to the cornice in Aberglasney’s drawing room. And so I am returning it. It was 20 years ago that I took the console — a country-house-obsessed teenager on my year off, en route to my parents’ cottage in Pembrokeshire.
The house was in a terrible state, like the seat of a Welsh Miss Havisham. I climbed over a gate choked with nettles and rhododendrons as high as the gateposts. The roof of the house had fallen in. Its portico had been stolen and was about to be flogged at Christie’s. (An eagle-eyed Welsh antiquarian spotted the distinctive Ionic pillars in a sales catalogue and the portico has now been restored to its original site.) In front of the house there was a three-foot-deep pile of plaster fragments and damp, shattered wood. The console lay on top of the pile. If I didn’t take it, someone else would — that was my wicked logic, anyway. My excuse isn’t much helped by a recent Telegraph article in which another man admitted to pillaging Aberglasney 20 years before me — Neil Hamilton, the disgraced Tory MP, who grew up in nearby Ammanford.
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