Itinerantdaughter's Blog

My boss is going to a dinner party next week with suicide royalty.

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Dear ID,

Please tell P I am delighted he can come to dinner!  Shall we say 8.00pm?  Is there anything he doesn’t like to eat?

It will just be an informal dinner. Guests: John and Jo Spearman (old friends – he is the founding Chief Executive of Classic FM; I’ve known Jo his wife since Oxford.

Kathleen Hearst – of the Hearst family – is the new President of the American Associates of the Royal Academy of Arts, and is over from New York – so I said I’d give a supper for her.

Jasper Conran, the designer.

The Duke and Duchess of Marlborough.  Sunny and Lily – Sunny, now in his 80s, has recently remarried, to the beautiful Lily, who is of Asian extraction – and I’ve known her years.  He was a great friend of my old friend, the late Mark Birley.

Frieda Hughes is the daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath – and a triumph of optimism and sunshine, considering such a childhood!  – a poet, painter and she’s beautiful – plus Gavin Rankin, who used to run Annabel’s for Mark and now owns Bellamy’s.

Xxx B

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I want to go!

I really wanted to buy the rights to this book for my office, but the bitches at Hesperus Press never wrote back to me.  Here is the catalog synopsis of Premature Burial: How It May Be Prevented by Walter Hadwen, William Tebb and Edward Perry Vollum, which I guarantee would have sold fantastically at Urban Outfitters:

“Terrified of being buried alive?  This spine-chilling VIctorian volume retells unnerving stories of live burials and narrow escapes.

Long out of print, this book was written to reassure the many nineteenth-century people who were apparently worried (to death?) about being buried alive.  Indeed, one of the authors himself had a narrow escape, as his collaborator writes: ‘Dr. Vollum first became interested in the important question of Premature Burial in consequence of his own very narrow escape from live sepulture, having been pronounced dead from drowning, and prepared for interment, when consciousness happily returned spontaneously.’

This edited version of the book extracts the most frightening stories of narrow escapes and living burials from a mass of historical material.  Its contents list includes: Animal and So-called Human Hibernation, Narrow Escapes from Premature Burial, Premature Burial of Doubtful Cases, Death-Counterfeits, The Danger of Hasty Burials, Sudden Death, Embalming and Dissections and Count Karnice-Karnicki’s Intervention.

From the preface: ‘The danger, as I have attempted to show, is very real –– to ourselves, to those most dear to us, and to the community in general, and it should be a subject of very anxious concern how this danger may be minimised or altogether prevented.'”

*Dispatch from the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport