LAST week I had to have emergency treatment for chronic back sprain. After two days of intensive therapy I managed the five-minute walk to my car in a record 20 minutes, desperate to be driven to my physio. Sadly the car was gone. Fearing the worst, I called the car pound. I rang Kensington town hall, requesting that my car, which had been legally parked and illegally towed, be returned.
And I needed the car because of my bad back. I was put through to Miss Williams. Miss Shew suggested Mr Wilson. Miss Birch said better speak to Mr Yates. Mr Yates was in a meeting. Eventually Mr Yates, Parking Enforcement Manager, rang and said there had been a sign farther up the road from my car indicating that parking was restricted the day my car was left. There was no way he would authorise its return.
Mr Yates disagreed that two contradictory signs in one bay were an indication of council incompetence.
He scoured the countryside, was gazumped on a haunted house which is now the home of Prince Michael of Kent, and ended up with Leixlip, one of the first castles built by the Normans in Ireland. In , Desmond and his first wife, the late Princess Marie-Gabrielle of Urach-Wurtemberg, moved into Leixlip with books, a mattress and a gun. The couple were known as part of the jeunesse dore. The castle had mod cons like windows with stone mullions added in the 17th century and 19th century battlements.
When the couple moved in, it had baths, but they were in the fields being used as water troughs, and wiring so unsafe the electricity board refused to reconnect the power. But the interior had been elegantly remodelled in Georgian times. They set about decorating it and buying at country sales. Desmond bid 10 shillings for an unremarkable kitchen table in one crowded auction. Desmond now lives in Leixlip with Penny, his wife of 10 years and a former lover of Lucian Freud; Eileen, his cook of 31 years, who is ever ready for impromptu dinners for 40; and the ghost of a multi-headed hound whose heads appear at the windows.
