I was asked, in January, if I would have dinner with the winner of a raffle in aid of the Conservative party. I gladly agreed. Months later Percy and I turned up a polite 20 minutes late at the Drones Club, only to find a near-empty room. The only people there were two Labour MPs who were so delighted that the Tories hadn’t shown that they jokingly offered to give us dinner. An hour later the raffle winner arrived with some tipsy mates and I found myself the only woman at a table of ten. Thank goodness Percy was there for moral support. I asked Mr Lucky why he was an hour late and he replied, smirking, ‘Well, we knew you’d be late.’ ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘’Cos you’re an actress, aintcha?’ Seventeen bottles of wine later, which in all probability necessitated a large overdraft at his bank, conversation began to get more than spirited until in vino veritas one wag remarked, ‘I knew you would look good but didn’t realise your husband would be so f—– handsome.’ ‘Oh dear,’ I trilled in my best glacially icy, Mary Whitehouse voice, ‘Darling, they’re using the f-word, it’s time we left,’ and fighting the temptation to order another vodka martini, to either drink or throw over him, we sailed out. I vowed never to be raffled again.
I’ll never complain about BT again. After eight days of our French phone, fax and email lines being disconnected because of a massive storm in St Tropez, we were at the end of our tethers. I tried to be calm, muttering ‘C’est la vie!’ with a Gallic shrug when the lines first died on Wednesday night. But by the following Wednesday it seemed that no amount of cajoling or persuasion was able to budge the bloody bureaucratic French telecommunications operatives. Even telling them we have my son’s year-old baby in the house didn’t cut any ice. Some friends who were supposed to visit on Saturday became so worried when they couldn’t reach us that they called the local gendarmerie, who arrived on Sunday. They were charm personified, spoke perfect English and even called France Télécom themselves, to absolutely no avail. Another concerned friend sent her butler to us. He likewise called France Télécom, who finally, grudgingly, said they knew about the problem and would ‘try and deal with it by Tuesday night’. Tuesday? That was almost two weeks since everything stopped working. Quelle horreur! On the bright side, my husband didn’t receive stacks of scummy emails and the house was free of jangling phones and faxes, except for our mobiles, on which, when people finally got through, they sounded quite cross that they’d had such trouble reaching us.
Global warming seems to have affected this region too. It used to be that summer on the C
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