My Landlord...
Sounds like Boris Johnson, writes about his father (who was a truly mad old buffer) and architecture.

Lives in a 20-odd bedroomed georgian mansion that is slightly shabby. House is filled with his father's antiques and only recently had electricity fitted. He's got to be 60 if he's a day and he just broke his ankle whilst picking apples from his orchard.

He is properly eccentric, but his old fella takes the biscuit. "The Professor" as he was known, was an architect who did work on places like Woburn Abbey, but who had an obsession with the Regency period. To the point of dressing like a regency dandy, even though it was 1950, and going to dinner at his friends house, taking his wife in a sedan chair.

He used to run round the town (which he owned most of), burst into peoples' houses in order to sketch fireplaces or other architectural details he had been told about.

The locals just grew used to his charming, childish (yet slightly unhinged) enthusiasm and erratic behaviour and he was seen as something they were oddly proud to be associated with. In fact, one of the previous tennants of the big pile I now rent (which is next door to this old buffer's house), was a Victoria Cross winner who sunk the Tirpitz using mini submarines. It's a funny place.

Makes you proud to be British.
(Chad, Fri 31 Oct 2008, 9:54, Reply)