I used to be good friends with a lad who was son and heir to one of the stately homes of England.
His house was a 400yo Elizabethan monolith, with 42 bedrooms, a ballroom, statues, oak panelling, and paintings and curtains to match, which stood atop a hill, and was open to the public.

Our main residence was the West Wing, and his madly alcoholic father only ever came in to tell us to get him more gin and cigarettes, his mother was pretty well a ghost - flitting from room to room occassionally, giving us a tired, wan smile should we ever meet, and the servants would occassionally join us if they thought that they could get away with it, but on the whole we were pretty much allowed to do as we pleased. Our only real obligation was to turn on the burglar alarm when we went to bed.

In order to get to said alarm we had to cross to the other side of the house, down a couple of corridors and into one of the back buildings, invariably in the darkness as all the lights bar ours would have been turned off.

Late one evening at about 11 or 12, he recommended that we watch a great film that he'd found called The Shining. Having seen it before, and having got on the outside of several cans of cider, he fell into a deep, drunken stupour.

Meaning that I had to turn the alarm on.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Thu 5 Apr 2012, 16:46, Reply)