I spent the weekend in bed, nursing a streaming cold and reading the new-ish book by Sofka Zinovieff The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, Mt Grandmother and Me which describes the amazing ménage at Faringdon in the 1930s with dyed doves in the park, a folly designed by the Duke of Wellington, and visits from the artistic avant garde, including Stravinsky, Salvador Dalí and Gertrude Stein, presided over by Berners himself, rich, talented and saturnine in a yellow bow-tie and a skullcap knitted by the wife of J.D. Beazley, the Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology.