Being invited into the home of the duchess was bound to shift one’s social equilibrium slightly off kilter. As we were greeted in the covered courtyard by the duchess and her family, some aristocratic wag clutching a small child let slip that the house been home to the family for 800 years. He then looked ashamed he’d said this and explained that actually the original owners – from the time when it was a simply a castle and not a palace – were the in-laws of the current owners; clearly they still had some inter-family issues to settle from over 750 years ago. That’s aristocratic, that is.
Grand stairways of carved Spanish oak led into a series of elaborately panelled rooms, and even I could tell that the style of interior decorating hadn’t shifted much from the 18th century originals, when (according to our blabby aristo with the sprog) the castle had became a palace. Flunkeys in penguin suits and gloves served canapés and drinky poos (believe me, they weren’t just drinks) and the great and the good and the merely average rubbed shoulders in serious social jostling, while intense middle aged men and women stood foursquare against the antecedents of the room and spent long periods of time braying loudly into their mobile phones and blocking entry and egress from one room to another.
I’m not one for these kinds of occasions, but our hosts were patrons of the Hay Festival in Segovia and it was deemed polite to attend, though our absence would hardly have been noticed in the dense, shrill throng. Possibly the local country director of the British Council would have noticed, and he would quite possibly have pointed a threatening cocktail stick at an empty, BC-shaped space. I don’t know. We grabbed a few harmless nibbles on sticks – actually we grabbed a whole load for this was to be lunch and I wanted to be out of range before the suckling pigs were chopped into quarters by plate wielding nobles. Puzzled? I can see you haven’t visited Segovia before. The plates are then thrown to the ground, proving, if nothing else, that it isn’t only the Greeks who go in for smashing crockery.
The rooms were hot and heaving and I was still carrying numerous bags containing work related items, like computers, as we had just decanted (that seems the right word) from giving a couple of sessions at the festival. In amongst the crowd were some seriously famous people but I had had enough of my fill of hanging on the periphery of the blesséd in the hope of being anointed by association many years ago. Before too long we dumped the last half kilo of bacalao, jamón and chorizo on sticks into our gullets and descended the stairs past argumentative guests and back into the street overlooking the great aqueduct and breathed the fresh mountain air. At that moment I was pretty sure that had I lived in mediaeval times and – even more absurdly – I had had a choice in the matter then I would have been a monk, not a duke, and I certainly wouldn’t have been a duchess.
