When Boris Met Dave

Much ado about some Hoorays.

The Importance of the Thank-You Letter

From The Times
December 27, 2007
'I appreciate your gift more than I can say'
Thank-you letters: the last bastion in an epidemic of discourtesy? They certainly make a big difference
by Valerie Grove

Have you written your thank-you letters yet? Mother’s words continue to dog most of us for life. They hover like a black cloud over the season of festive giving and partying. We all vaguely expect a letter of thanks, but find them a crashing bore to write. Thanks sent immediately are thanks redoubled, we were told. “No duty is more urgent than that of returning thanks” – Saint Ambrose.

The thank-you letter is a last bastion in what Mary Killen (The Spectator’s witty social problem-solver) has called an “epidemic of discourtesy”. The postal strike this year did its best to kill off the personal letter, but for my generation, whose youth was punctuated with billets doux and penfriendship, a letter remains a tangible, portable, idiosyncratic and expressive form of communication. Princess Diana – who would now have been 46 – was probably one of the last of those well-brought up gels, or “chicks”, who never failed to write enthusiastic thanks in her girlishly round but emphatic hand.

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The Return of the Old Etonian

Article by Christopher Hitchens, which Sloane Rangers will surely find riveting.
There are a number of reasons why America does not have an Eton. In order to evolve such a school, you have to start with a monarchical foundation in the mid-15th century. (King Henry VI simultaneously founded King’s College, Cambridge.) A few hundred years of feudalism and empire are then required, during which time 18 of the country’s prime ministers attend the school, as do countless generals, ambassadors, and colonial governors. A vivid legend of the three B’s—bullying, beating, and buggery—must spring up, imprinting itself thoroughly on the formative years of a ruling caste. The national poetry must show the school’s influence, from Thomas Gray to Shelley to Swinburne. Eton is not just where George Orwell went to school, there to be taught by Aldous Huxley, so that the future authors of 1984 and Brave New World could be in the same classroom. It is where Evelyn Waugh sends Sebastian Flyte and Anthony Blanche, the two most flamboyant figures of Brideshead Revisited. It is where J. M. Barrie sends Captain Hook. It is where P. G. Wodehouse sends Bertie Wooster and Psmith. It is where Anthony Powell, another Etonian, sends Nick Jenkins, the narrator of A Dance to the Music of Time. It is where Ian Fleming sends James Bond (expelled, unusually enough, for heterosexuality). It is where John le Carré evolved the concept of the honorable schoolboy.
It’s impossible to overstate the effect that the Eton mystique can exert on the most improbable people. All through the spring and summer of this year, a capacity crowd went every night to the National Theatre to see Jeremy Irons playing an elder statesman in Howard Brenton’s Never So Good. Brenton is a renowned ultra-leftist, but his moving play, which is about the life and times of the Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan, is unashamedly evocative of the double-distilled Eton legend.