Net loss

The scene is a drawing-room at nightfall. A group of weekenders sit in time-honoured tradition around a crackling fire. One is engrossed in a magazine; another chats with her boyfriend; the rest debate whether the word ‘zapateado’ is permissible in their board game. But this is not a house party as Terence Rattigan knew it: the magazine is being read on an iPad; the lovers are exchanging endearments by text message; the game-players have swapped the Scrabble set for a laptop with access to Wordscrape. New technology is tightening its grip on our lives, and not even the country house weekend is immune.

The CHW was once a little pocket of days isolated from normality; a stage on which a hostess could play at being director, choosing an amusing cast of characters and watching them flirt and scrap. It wasn’t always a walk in the Humphrey Repton park. For every natural guest happy to bob along like Bertie Wooster on a current of chit chat there would be another — humiliated on the croquet lawn or peeved at not getting the best bedroom — whose weekend was given over to plotting revenge. But like it or not, everyone was in it together, and accepted the need to muck in.

Back then, a guest craving communication with the outside world was invariably dependent on his host’s good offices: one only has to think of the frustrated film producer in Gosford Park trying to take a call from America. Even when television found its way into the house it was rarely made available, except for crucial events such as the final Ashes test. The only ready source of news was the morning newspapers — chosen, of course, by the host.