Low life | 2 June 2012

Our Scottish visitors, man and wife, came bearing lavish gifts: a beribboned fruit cake in a Union Jack cake tin; a bottle of Bollinger; a bottle of Bailie Nicol Jarvie old Scotch Whisky (their favourite tipple); a bottle of nubile white Burgundy; four ‘Katie Morag’ children’s books; The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson, which made them both laugh in bed; a heavy, 19in high relief sculpture of Eos, Titan goddess of the dawn (she of the rosy fingers); a circular plaster plaque featuring a bust, in relief, of their jaw-droppingly beautiful middle daughter Sophie, clad in a toga, her...