Wednesday, October 18, 2006

A Night In Front Of The Fire

Well, Miles cooked us a lovely dinner; Parma ham and a strong, shaved parmesan over passion fruit, followed by roast chicken with a lovely crispy skin and then onto a kind of mini fruit trifle. We managed to forget about the cheese we’d bought though, as we went through to the Drawing Room for coffee while David & Ping did the washing up. We spent a while reading and then played Cluedo until the small hours.

I read some of the history of the house; one of the things the Landmark Trust does is include detailed dossiers of their properties for you to read while you are in residence. Pretty much everything in the house is either original, a careful reproduction of the original or, in only a few cases, an educated guess about what something would have been, or something following a Pugin design from elsewhere.

It turns out that Brett and I are sleeping in Pugin’s own bedroom. There have been a couple of moments where I have felt myself walking in the footsteps of greatness as I’ve walked around the house. Reading the history, I could visualise an image of the man shown in the portrait beside the fire, working at a large desk in the library, sketching designs of the objects that I have seen in the Lords’ Chamber at Westminster.

The headline from the Cluedo is that I won both games. The detail in the small print is, I think, that everyone else was higher than I was and their logical thinking was somewhat impaired. (It probably didn’t help either that Miles and Ping took on the roles of the Bad Idea Bears (from Avenue Q) and apart from offering extra intoxication to all and sundry, kept whispering, “Accuse… accuse… accuse… accuse…” every time someone was about to check a suspicion!)

We finally rolled off to bed a little after 1am.

3 comments:

MadeInScotland said...

sounds great...where exactly are you?

Liam said...

We were at 'The Grange', Ramsgate. we booked through The Landmark Trust; http://www.landmarktrust.org.uk/

Anonymous said...

Higher? What were you guys on?