LONDON

have moved to my town house in London for a bit. I get rather frustrated at this time of year when everyone keeps telling me that the animals I want to shoot are not in season. I would have thought it more reasonable to shoot them when the females are not in season unless you want to bag two at a time, Ha! Ha! Some of the locals down my way are a bit parochial and lack a sense of humour.

There are other reasons for moving to the metropolis. I have a number of board meetings to attend at this time of year - a group of shareholders were actually trying to object to my re-election at one of them! It was only a group of people with comparatively small holdings and things like this don't worry me too much as I often invite the people who control the Pension Funds down to Crapulent Towers for the weekend and they have a large enough holding to maintain the Status Quo.

To be quite honest I was also beginning to feel unsettled at Crapulent Towers. I was wandering about the West Wing the other night, as one does, when a series of occurrences got to me. As I was strolling along one of the corridors I first heard some intense groans followed a little further along the floor by a series of desperate grunting noises. This was followed by coming across one of my daughters, whose name my good lady wife tells me is Aneemia, who frankly frightened the life out of me for a moment as I thought she was one of the ghosts for which our auspicious home is renowned. I shouldn't have been that surprised as most of my offspring frighten the life out of me, but this was an unnerving experience in a quite different way. I had, my good lady wife further informed me, discovered the rooms where most of my daughters reside at times, in fact I understand that some of them virtually live in this quarter, it's no wonder that I can't keep track of them, I probably haven't seen some of them for years. If daughters don't perform any useful function and won't get married what on earth good are they to anybody?

To my relief my good lady wife decided not to accompany me to the metropolis and I can see her point of view. I understand her not wanting to rough it too much nowadays; after all none of us are getting any younger. We only keep a limited staff at our London house. I have a sort of Major Domo who doubles as butler and valet and a housekeeper/cook, then there are a couple of parlourmaids and an odd-job lad, and probably one or two others but there cannot be more than eight in the entire household. One cannot maintain a London residence as one would wish nowadays. Naturally when we do entertain at Berkeley Square we get more servants in from the agency on a temorary basis, although they are generally pretty useless, not interested in the service they are employed to perform but only their proportion of the agency fees, whatever that might be. God knows the agency charges us well enough.