NDC One of the things I love most about this glorious magazine is the fact that its timelessness affords it an afterlife which other, lesser publications can only aspire to. Once the family has enjoyed it and it has spent a month or so on the coffee table/ottoman/zebra-skin pouffe, it invariably processes in a stately manner towards the downstairs loo. Here it may stay for anything up to a century, and like Dorian Gray, it grows not old.
The country house loo, which doubles as rod library, is so much more than a place to ‘freshen up’, and as an institution, it is to be celebrated and enjoyed the length and breadth of this land. The best ones are miniature museums, housing rare and eccentric treasures, often jumbled together with mementoes of sporting, military or romantic glory, and always worth lingering in. The best one I’ve ever visited lies off the entrance hall of a beautiful house in the north of England OPENING SHOTS and looks out over a famous garden to the grouse moor beyond. It is a room with a view in every sense of the word. When visiting this house, I always wait until the lunch party is well down into its second case of rosé so that I won’t be missed when I go to admire the eclectic array of wonderful visual treats, from photographs of the owner with both Ronald Reagan and a recently expired Cape buffalo, through to the rudest Mark Huskinson cartoon I have ever seen. This is a haven of uncontrived style, individualism and elegance and the perfect place to thumb through a 1973 back copy of .
