Welcome to Part Two of Anthony Trollope's Christmas at Thompson Hall, our newest Yuletide audio adventure in Tales for Our Time. We thank you for all your kind comments about this choice for our seventy-sixth yarn. Steyn Clubber Alison Castellina writes:
A delightful story, so true and well written. I have been in Paris at Easter (which is falsely conveyed as so romantic in the musicals) and nearly died.. I travelled there confidently assuming spring weather with too few warm clothes and I never forgot the wide bleakness of its freezing boulevards and being chilled to the bone.
This story seems to be about 'eccentric' feelings about food items as medicine which I suspect is a male trait. I heard exactly the same story from a male colleague who had the early form of respiratory Covid. He was lying in his bed at 2am in May 2020 barely able to breathe and knew that either he would end up on a ventilator and die - or, if someone would help him, he would eat a punnet of strawberries before dawn - and live. So he called a male friend, who got up and dressed, drove miles around all night garages, found strawberries, left them at his door - and they worked. The very definition of a genuine supporter is someone who will trawl.a windy, dark coastline at 3am for strawberries..
You might have a point, Alison. My late BBC "News Quiz" partner Peter Cook had a very varied career, until his partner Dudley Moore went to Hollywood and Peter took to staying up late and calling up overnight radio hosts on LBC pretending to be a reactionary cab-driver. But at one point in the Sixties he ran a celebrated London comedy club called The Establishment for which he brought over Lenny Bruce, putting him up at the Ritz. The Ritz kicked him out, saying his room was full of syringes and hookers, so Peter invited him to share his flat in Battersea. At two in the morning, Lenny wakes him up and says he needs some heroin. So Peter, grumbling, gets up, gets dressed, goes out, wanders around the streets and comes back with some. It's now three in the morning, and Lenny's changed his mind: he's decided he needs some chocolate cake. Britain's capital wasn't exactly a 24/7 service town in those days, and so Peter wearily explained to his guest that, while it was just about possible to find some heroin in the middle of the night in London, there was absolutely no chance of procuring any chocolate cake at that hour.
In tonight's episode of Anthony Trollope's tale, Mrs Brown has retrieved the mustard for her ailing husband, only to find that he doesn't seem to be that ailing after all:
He was sleeping there like an infant, with full, round, perfected, almost sonorous workings of the throat. Who does not know that sound, almost of two rusty bits of iron scratching against each other, which comes from a suffering windpipe? There was no semblance of that here...
After all her labor, she would have left the pungent cataplasm on the table and have crept gently into bed beside him, had not a thought suddenly struck her of the great injury he had been doing her if he were not really ill. To send her down there, in a strange hotel, wandering among the passages, in the middle of the night, subject to the contumely of any one who might meet her, on a commission which, if it were not sanctified by absolute necessity, would be so thoroughly objectionable! At this moment she hardly did believe that he had ever really been ill. Let him have the cataplasm; if not as a remedy, then as a punishment.
To hear me read the second episode of Christmas at Thompson Hall, please click here and log-in. If you missed part one, you'll find that here. If you've yet to hear our first Trollope serialisation, The Fixed Period, that can be found here.
Tales for Our Time started as an experimental feature we introduced as a bonus for Mark Steyn Club members, and, as you know, I said if it was a total stinkeroo, we'd eighty-six the thing and speak no more of it. But I'm thrilled to say it's proved very popular, and and we now have quite an archive. If you're a Club member and you incline more to the stinkeroo side of things, give it your best in the Comments Section below.
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