Laura Freeman

Knock, knock. Who’s there? Well, according to the app it was the Evri man at 10.27, the Yodel man at 11.17, the post lady at 13.44 and the nursery-run mum with double buggy at 15.22. What romance, what mystery in the age of the Ring doorbell? Every coming and going, every missed parcel and key fumble is filmed, timestamped and sent to my husband’s phone with a notification. We resisted Ring for two years. Two years of a broken doorbell and delivery drivers hammering on the door. Over the summer we caved and now the house is monitored night and day. ‘Must make it difficult,’ I mused to Andy as we reviewed the footage on the first evening, ‘for anyone to have affairs any more.

P-p-pick up a pebble. Feel its weight in your palm. Roll it over under your thumb. Any good? Not sure? Shuck it back on the shingle. Plenty of fish in the sea and more pebbles still on the shore. In The Pebbles on the Beach: A Spotter’s Guide, Clarence Ellis, pebble-spotter par excellence, opens with the words: ‘Most people collect something or other: stamps, butterflies, beetles, moths, dried and pressed wildflowers, old snuffboxes, china dogs and so forth. A few eccentrics even collect bus tickets! But collectors of pebbles are rare.’ We are not talking about the common or garden or indeed communal garden collector of pebbles – the sort with a wheelbarrow and a trowel. A true pebble-spotter does not make off with cartloads to resurface the driveway.

‘And now the end is here / And so I face the final curtain…’ You said it, Frank. The lights dim, the curtain falls, exeunt all to rapturous applause. Too rapturous, if you ask me. The standing ovation, once the exception, is now the rule. Post-Covid, I got it. After months of empty theatres and keeping the ghost lamps burning, I’d have clapped any man and his dog to the skies. But university revues, pub two-handers, primary-school plays? I feel a scab for sitting when every man jack is on his feet. I did it at Cabaret, The Glass Menagerie and Straight Line Crazy. A sit-in protest. ‘Grinch,’ you’ll say, and fair enough. But I want a standing ovation to mean something. An exclamation mark, not just a standard full-stop.

‘Sides to middle’, that’s the cry. When your foot goes through the flat sheet in the night, there’s only one thing for it: scissors down the centre, then sew it edge to edge. Good as new – for as long as your stitches hold up. If you’ve paid for Egyptian cotton, you cannot cut your linen into dusters the minute the thread count wears thin. Besides, call it eco-activism, call it penny--pinching, mending things is fun. From time to time, when my husband is washing up, a plate will crumble like a biscuit in his hands. Seeing his ‘it wasn’t me’ expression, I’ll tell him that the plate, glued and glued again, was beyond salvation. Then I’ll glue it together again.

Give us a snog. Pucker up at the Christmas party. Kiss me quick at the Nativity play. Will you be snogging this season? Thérèse Coffey, Secretary of State for Work, Pensions and Office Passion, has spoken. ‘I don’t think there should be much snogging under the mistletoe.’ she told Robert Peston on ITV. Sajid Javid, Secretary of State for Health, weighed in: ‘I’ll certainly be kissing my wife under the mistletoe — it’s a Javid family tradition.’ Not just a Javid tradition. Mistletoe is a pale green shrub which grows on the branches of broad-leaved trees. It is hemiparasitic, which means that it draws water and mineral nutrients, but not synthesised foods, from its host. Shakespeare thought it more dismal than cheerful.

On a clear day, from the balcony of Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery in Carlisle, you can see the McVitie’s factory. If the wind were in the right direction, I like to think you’d smell digestives on the breeze. Originally, it was the factory of Carr’s, bakers of table water biscuits since 1831. Carr’s held the Royal Warrant from 1841 until 2012, when it lost the crown due to ‘changing tastes’ in the royal household. I blame Duchy Originals Oaten Biscuits. Inside the museum is a display of Carr’s covetable vintage biscuit tins and, on a satin hanger, the brown velvet waistcoat worn by Jonathan Dodgson Carr himself. The fabric is printed with ears of wheat and the tiny slogan ‘Free’.

Jules Léotard was blessed in his name. It might have been quite different had he been called, say, Jules Droupé. As it was, his family name was lithe, elongated, taut. It was a name with stretch. Léotard was born in Toulouse in 1838, the son of a gymnastics teacher. The young Jules might have become a lawyer. He passed his legal exams, but twisting words wasn’t enough. He wanted to be twisting, turning, falling, flying. At 18, he began to practise with trapeze bars, ropes and rings over a swimming pool. He joined the Cirque Napoléon, and on 12 November 1859 performed its first flying trapeze routine.

Press officers, breathe easy. This is not another column attacking the National Trust. Actually, I tell a lie. It is. But my complaint isn’t bullying or slavery or LGBTQ+ery or even chocolate Easter eggery. It is more single and specific: the National Trust does not speak architecture. Or if it does, it’s keeping shtum. Since the great May reopening, I’ve dragged my husband around half a dozen National Trust properties, landscapes and gardens (he hardly ever protests, always pays for tea). We’ve done Stourhead, Oxburgh, Ickworth, Lacock, Cobham Woods and Disraeli’s Hughenden Manor. In the gap between lockdowns last year, we did Sissinghurst and Knole. I cannot fault the car parks, the rhododendrons or the second-hand bookshop in the Oxburgh potting shed.