In Strangford. It's very beautiful, the sort of beauty that only the wealthy can enjoy. Or people like me enjoying a cheap holiday in other people's happiness. I'm here for the filming of "The Beautiful Silence", a fifteen minute short that I've been calling "a ghost story without the ghost" in the hope that it would catch on. So far it hasn't. The location is director Adam's dad's house and it is the second nicest house I've ever been in. The nicest, and that isn't really the correct word, belonged to a homosexual South African millionaire vintner. During my brief say there Vogue turned up to use his garden as a photographic location and Earl Spencer popped over for lunch. That's Princess Diana's brother. Who was, rather annoyingly, quite nice.
But Adam pere's pile is pretty impressive. For one thing it appears to be be four houses in one, like the Beatles' groovy pad in "A Hard Days Night". There is an ornamental garden on three levels, with a coy carp pond and a fountain. There are books on Chinese erotic art, statues of Saint Sebastian and the single largest collection of antique binoculars I have ever seen. (Though I promise to swing by the "Museum of Binoculars" next time I'm in Tring.)
It is the home of a well to do middle-aged Bohemian and as such my dream home. I will never live anywhere like it, of course. The appropriate accumulation of wealth should have started already and it hasn't. But hey, I'm a pretty hand-to-mouth kind of guy. It's the shortest journey after all.
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