It really has been a month of disappointments. Sometime last year my new young assistant Clive read out an email addressed to me (I never touch a computer myself for fear of catching a virus). This was from a company called something like Pumping!the!envelope.com who apparently make television programmes.

Having brought up sixteen children, fostered three and been a role model to thousands more I think I can say with some degree of confidence that no one loves babies more than I. Delightful, gurgling creatures they are and each time I have been summoned from the drawing room by a servant with the news that I am to be a father once again, I have always made a point of sending my wife my sincerest congratulations, before repairing to my club to stand a round of port.

When I first started to discover food between the wars, it was really not at all fashionable. Indeed in the better country houses it was seen merely as a necessity. Anyone who had the temerity to savour his food, or expressed heresy such as likes or dislikes, was not asked back for weekend parties. My father, the first Earl of Hunt , used to believe that the only sport for a gentleman was hunting or fishing, and in the same vein always harboured suspicions that any man who liked his food was probably a bit of a whoopsy, as he liked to call the chaps we now call Friends of Dorothy. ‘That fellow jumps too low in the leapfrog!” he used to rumble disapprovingly whenever dear old Evelyn came to tea.