When a footman’s home is his castle

My own love for this memoir may be all to do with snobbery and self-identification. Moreover, I’ve always thought a life downstairs is an underrated career opportunity, offering access to all the aesthetic pleasures of the big house while bypassing the nuisance of admin and the financial burdens of its upkeep. On another level, here is the psychic restfulness of parking your own ego while, like HM the Queen, you focus on serving. And now I’ve found a personal account which, in spare and understated comic style, not only confirms that theory but refreshes my memories of the old days in my Irish homeland.

Gillies Macbain totally gets the point of Ireland and its — mainly benign — peculiarities. He is not Irish himself, but he had fallen in love with the country and so, when in 1964 he failed to pass the exams for Trinity College, Dublin, he decided to go and live there anyway.