My stepchildren have now been here for four weeks. They are charming, sweet and I love them to bits. But they are also fairly useless around the house. It is only after four weeks that they have finally worked out one end of the dishwasher from the other. Yesterday I tried to teach Julia to iron. After ten minutes she, I and the poor unfortunate shirt lost the will to live.

The fact is that middle-class children in England today do about as much as Victorian children living in the colonies did.

The other day a friend of mine who lives in Sussex told me a story. Her fourteen-year-old daughter, who is at a local fee-paying school, brought a friend home to play. My friend’s husband was moving the lawn. Her daughter said hello to her step-father (like you would) and had a little chat.

“You’re very nice to your gardener,” commented her friend. Obviously one does not mow one’s lawn oneself.

Yesterday my in-laws took Hugo and Julia shopping for gym shoes. “What kind will you get?” Rupert asked Julia. “Tennis or gym or running?”

“Annabel has a different pair for everything,” replied Julia. Rupert asked Hugo why they expected to have a different pair of shoes for each occassion. “We’re middle class,” came the reply.

I can just imagine how hard Annabel’s poor father works to keep his family in trainers and gardeners (and before you call me sexist, being properly middle class her mother doesn’t work of course). As the writer Samuel Smiles said “Middle class people are apt to live up to their incomes, if not beyond them.”

Julia is off to Kenya on Wednesday and her main concern (aside from catching Malaria) is how hot it’s going to be.

“What were we doing aged 13,” I ranted to my husband last night. “Trying to avoid getting bashed and earning a crust washing cars or mucking out stables.”

But as we all know our children will never be impressed by how tough we had it. And nor will theirs be. But I dread to think just how spoiled they will be if the same pattern repeats itself for the next generation.

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007

It is lovely to be home. Trying to sleep in my hotel in London was like trying to sleep through an episode of NYPD Blues with the volume turned up to max. All I could hear outside were crimes being committed and police giving chase. The St Giles hotel is possibly the most charmless place I have ever been to (and I include our local rubbish tip in that). The location (just off Tottenham Court Road) has nothing to recommend it. But Richard & Judy went well, once I was able to get a word in.

Yesterday we had a lunch party. Among the guests were an opera singer and her opera director husband. We were treated to an aria from Don Giovanni in the garage. This is a woman who sings regularly at the Royal Opera House and La Scala. What she must have thought of our garage I dread to think. But she couldn’t have had a more enthusiastic audience. The girls were totally mad about her and kept nagging her to sing again. The opera singer is also into bird-watching and was thrilled to see our swallows who have now quadrupled in number. I fear we will have to move out soon to make room for their extended family.

Last night Bea went to bed singing unrecognisable arias at the top of her voice. Olivia got up this morning and immediately reached for some binoculars. She has been looking for birds ever since. It’s such a joy to have friends that are a better influence on one’s children than oneself.

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007

Dear Helena Frith Powell

Wonderful piece in Thursday’s Mail on the pomposity of ladies who object to
an innocent pinch of le derriere.

I’m what you might describe as an older man, but still have hair, most of my own teeth and am told very occasionally that I don’t look my age. I wonder if you think I might be considered one of your followers, so that, at a time and place to be agreed, I might apply a subtle tweak.

Yours sincerely

Neil Coppendale

This charming reader added his phone number to his letter, which of course I won’t be sharing with the rest of you.

Nice letters like this make me as happy as nasty ones make me miserable. But as my friend Jonathan says when I get a really nasty one “mail like this is a sign of success. It shows you can evoke passion in the very stupid”.

Mail like the above is a sign that there are still people in England with a good sense of humour (unlike the lady who had her bottom pinched).

Richard & Judy just called and I may be on tomorrow’s show to talk about bottom pinching. How will they introduce me I wonder? “Bottom pinching expert Helena Frith Powell”? So another upside to my article is that I get to cruise around in a chauffeur-driven car for an afternoon, have my own dressing room and feel like a celeb for three minutes.

If I ever meet the man who carried out the daring deed that caused all this (see today’s article) then remind me to pinch his bottom as a thank you.

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007

My arrival home has been dominated by cricket. My stepson Hugo has been watching the test match and Leo has become very interested.

“One day you’ll play cricket for England,” Rupert said to him this morning.

“Yes, now,” said Leo.

“You can’t play cricket for England now, you’re only four,” I said.

“But I will be five,” he replied.

The thought of Leo in cricket whites is too dreamy. I have always thought it is impossible for a man to look unattractive in whites; there is something so civilized, so gentle and so very English about them. Cricket whites are right up there with surgical kit when it comes to outfits men look great in.

Even Robert Mugabe, the most uncivilized of people, recognised cricket’s qualities. “Cricket civilizes people and creates good gentlemen,” he said in an article in the Sunday Times in 1984. “I want everyone to play cricket in Zimbabwe; I want ours to be a nation of gentlemen.” Shame he didn’t follow his own creed.

This evening we are going to a cricket match. Hugo and Rupert will play. I am so excited about seeing them play and also introducing Leo to the joys of hearing leather on willow for the first time.

As we enjoy this evening, a family in Kent is mourning the loss of a father-of-two after a jeering mob made up of boys as young as ten stoned him to death while he played cricket with his son. It was a completely unprovoked attack.

Can someone please tell me what is going over there?

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007