It wasn’t planned, well, it was planned in meticulous detail, but what I mean is, it wasn’t planned to take the course it did at the end. So in fact you’d have to say it wasn’t planned. It just happened, and in the most unusual way. Settle in, as I am (as the poor people say) goanna tell you all about it, in ways you are sure to find most instructive and worthwhile, with just a frisson of usefulness and a soupcon of, er, instructivity.
Ah, Lax Manors, my family pile! Its extensive, thick columnadery, its bronze tarnishing, its statuesque sculptures of St George slaying, sledging and slamming various dragons all around; its topiary, hedges and bushery; its five-lane, eleven-mile driveway and the unique follies all through the grounds – the fifty-foot marble tardis, and the enormous wedding cake filled with spiders. This is the place where I was born, grew, grew again, continued to grow and, I imagined, would die, if such a thing were possible. But fate, or should I say I, was ultimately to decree otherwise.
You can easily imagine the sumptuous façade of Lax Manors and the elaborate turning circle at its frontispiece which keeps the local police completely occupied directing traffic, and its hedgerows moulded to a tableau of Colonel De Groot belabouring the petit point at Aubergine. Now, can you imagine Old Rogers, loading up Carlo, the manor burro, with boxes and packages all tied with string, rope, and lacker bands? Puffing and panting, he hoists yet another parcel in place with the manor pulley, and carefully – always carefully – he straps another hydrogen balloon to Carlo’s head and tail every time his back concaves and his legs start to shake and buckle in a comedic fashion, and you can almost imagine him looking ththerwards and expressing the opinion ‘ay, caramba!’. For today, you see, is the day we journey to the
To be continuated…
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