WHILE old Camperdown was preoccupied with ploughing and sowing winter
wheat last Wednesday, I took the opportunity of making a flying visit to
Edinburgh in the Bentley Mulsanne Turbo to put in an appearance at the
Christmas private view taking place at Andrew and Sarah Whitfield's
Calton Gallery.
Goodness knows, Camperdown and I have enough oil paintings on our
walls already, but with Christmas in mind, one can't really go wrong
with an extra Horatio McCulloch or Gemmell Hutchison. And, do you know,
absolutely everybody has commented that the elegantly top-hatted woman
on horseback who features on the Calton Gallery's Christmas invitation
card is the spit image of me on Smudge, my hunter! Amazing really, since
the artist died 70 years ago! I wonder if it was modelled on my
grandmother?
In the strictest confidence, I have always rather admired Sarah
Whitfield whom I have known since she was a jolly young thing in
Northumberland. In those days everybody, at one stage or another, was
invited to Sarah's mother's villa in Minorca, next door to the one owned
by Richard Branson's parents. Although I never stayed there myself,
Henrietta, my sister, and I once dropped in for cocktails while on a
Mediterranean sailing trip in the early seventies. As you know, unlike
Henrietta, I don't much go in for these Mediterranean jaunts, and for me
it was a blessed relief to weigh anchor in Mahon Bay beneath Mrs
Davidson's house. To this day I can still recall Sarah's advice on
guarding one's honour against the advances of Moorish sailors. If only
Henrietta had listened!
And when Sarah first moved to live in Edinburgh, I distinctly remember
her announcing to me at a dinner party that she was going to open an
employment agency. My initial response was whatever for? But then she
did, and made a huge success of it. One does so approve of girls who get
on and do something with their lives. If only Fiona, my daughter, would
follow Sarah's example.
Later, when Andrew Whitfield, whose nickname is ''Tank'', had left his
regiment and he and Sarah were married, they turned their lovely
Georgian house in Edinburgh's Royal Terrace into a fine art gallery, and
one has always adored their periodic private view parties since
everybody seems to turn up at them sooner or later.
It does seem such a good idea, doesn't it? I mean, throwing parties
and getting people to buy things and thus subsidising the cost of the
champagne! Mind you, I'm not at all sure how I would personally feel
about constantly changing the paintings on one's walls. I suppose the
consolation is that one never gets bored with them, but since the
majority of our pictures are Camperdown ancestors, I don't imagine
anybody would want to buy them in the first place. And besides, our
Titian and the majority of our Van Dykes and Raeburns are out on loan
anyway.
THROUGH my unimpeachable south-west of Scotland grapevine, I hear that
Jamie Hunter Blair is to allow Blairquhan, his lovely, home near
Straiton, in Ayrshire, to be used for a Christmas sale next Thursday.
The organisers are those pretty girls Annette Hammond-Chambers and
Caroline Gordon-Duff, under their collective name of CHUFFS, and what
they do is to get together a collection of their more talented chums who
all make little things, and then they set up a series of stalls and
invite everybody they know to come along and do their Christmas
shopping.
To make things even more praiseworthy, they charge an entrance fee
which they then donate, with a percentage of the overall takings, to a
charity such as the Malcolm Sargent Cancer Fund for Children.
A few weeks ago the same team held a two-day sale at Arniston in West
Lothian, Althea Dundas-Bekker's breathtaking William Adam mansion, which
she has worked so hard to restore, and I gather it was a smashing
success. To make things even more fun, Annette and Caroline enlisted
big, cuddly Sandy Irvine Robertson to set up a wine tasting in the
evening which was guaranteed to be a hoot since he is so wonderfully
individual and entertaining. Alas, Camperdown and I were having an
argument about slurry spreading at the time, so we ended up staying at
home.
Blairquhan, although a bit of a marathon from here, has to be a must,
and I have suggested to Camperdown that on the way past we should look
in on Fiona, our daughter, in Glasgow, to see how she's getting along.
Such a pity her university term ends on the 17th, otherwise one would
have been able to make certain she came straight home for the holidays.
Last year we managed to pack her off for a fortnight's ski-ing with some
suitable friends to Val d'Isere. This year she says she wants to go
mountain-biking in Nepal. Have you ever heard of anything so ridiculous!
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