Do admit!

   

 

     A hectic afternoon and evening yesterday dashing hither and yon. I'm far from being a social butterfly but I had several places to be as well as things to do at home in between so it was all a bit of a scurry. The highlight of the day - far and away - was to see the wonderful Deborah Devonshire, dowager duchess, youngest Mitford, "Debo" herself, in conversation with Magnus Linklater and Charlotte Mosley on the subject of Charlotte's book The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters. This was a huge treat for me (and Simon, you'd have loved it, too) as she was everything I'd expected and more. It is to my great regret that though I stood in the signing queue after the event for quite some time I had to leave before I reached its head so I didn't get to meet her, and I mind that, I really do!

     Accused by her sister Nancy of being illiterate, she was nonetheless suspected by family and friends of being a secret reader, and while others pretend to have read books they haven't so much as opened, Debo pretends not to have read a great deal she actually has. But joking apart, she's a consummate businesswoman (naming Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Ginger and Pickles as the best book on retailing ever written) and a woman of immense natural funniness and straightforward charm. 

     I'm in danger of boring my family by constantly trying to read aloud to them excerpts from the letters while being unable to speak for laughing. The editor's job must have been extraordinarily difficult as the book's 800 pages reproduce only a tiny percentage of the 12,000 letters (yes, that figure is correct) the sisters sent one another, but they wrote so well and with such wit, warmth and candour that compiling it must have been a hugely enjoyable task.

     To whom does Debo write now, I wonder, as her sisters are all gone, and what would her parents, the famous Muv and Farve, make of the intense interest in - and even industry surrounding - their daughters' lives?