20th November, 2009

Had a lovely month or so on gardening leave and am now here at Nomura. Our Argentinian couple went back to South America four days after I left CLSA so I was basically housebound looking after Furtie’s puppies with the odd foray onto Royal Worlington golf course, a bit of hound exercising and shooting and I took Bob up to Scotland stalking. Otherwise I basically swept leaves off the lawn. Sophie and I did have a little trip out of the country early on. We had a three day window of opportunity and Sophie desperately wanted to go to Rome. Alas the flights didn’t work out so I came up with the brilliant idea of a surprise trip to her homeland, Sweden. I say homeland. She is half Swedish, though she had never actually been there. Suffice to say she still hasn’t. I went on the Ryan Air website to try to find suitable flights to Stockholm, but there weren’t any so I reluctantly clicked on Easy jet and, blow me down, there were flights at precisely the right times. It was only after booking the flights and while I was printing off the boarding passes that the appalling realisation dawned on me that the capital of Sweden had become, in my pea-brain, Copenhagen and I had booked us tickets to Denmark. So I was very popular needless to say. In fact, happy postscript for a change, we both had a lovely time in Denmark. Sophie was able to at least see Sweden across the water and we bought the most deliciously luxurious Siberian goose down duvet.

Time flies by in Hen’s world. She rang home in a state of high excitement yesterday with the news that she had been offered a place to read (?) Art at Leeds contingent on her achieving A level grades of BBC ( coincidentally precisely what her father managed just a few years earlier....I lobbed in a 1 at S level geography too btw before you unduly deride me ). This remarkably generous offer is entirely down, so Hen tells me, to the “utterly brilliant personal statement” she had prepared together with her application. Now that is a bit of paper I would like to get my hands on! There was additional excitement yesterday provided by the fact that Bob and Lottie met the Queen who was paying a visit to Kings on its 800th anniversary. Lottie, you may recall, was the girl who concluded from the fact that some scaffolding had been erected on Kings Chapel that they were obviously building a new one as “it is rather old you know Mummy”. I digress....I asked Lottie if she had also seen the Queen’s husband. “No”, she replied. “He wasn’t there. She was with the Duke of Edinburgh.” You may have to think about that one!