Airs And Disgraces

As the spring influx of house guests commences, royal bad manners will not be indulged.

- Michele Hewitson

Here at Lush Places, as we like to call our country estate – or, as The Artist likes to call it, Flushed Faces – we have just had the first in a promised series of spring visitors.

I quite honestly thought I’d never see my friends again once we moved to the country – in the back of a taxi on the way home from a farewell lunch with my best mates, I cried like my lamb, Elizabeth Jane, when she wants her bottle. Who would travel all the way to little old Masterton to trot about in sheep paddocks with lambs and chickens?

As it turns out, everyone. We had never had house guests before. When everyone you know lives in Auckland, and you live in Auckland, people are hardly going to come for a long weekend, are they? So we are still new to this idea of having people to stay. For anyone similarly new to this, I recommend reading Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, by Private Eye parodist Craig Brown.