A Daughter's Guide To Life
1. Marry for money. Your children will never forgive you if you marry for love and then complain about school fees and offer up only feeble holidays and shared bedrooms.
2. Only drink tea in good china.
3. Diamonds must always be worn if there is even the slimmest chance you may drink champagne at some point in your life; so at breakfast, luncheon tiffin and supper.
4. Wear lashings of pearls and cashmere and expensive scent when going to confession - you will find it softens the blow of the penance.
5. Diamonds fare better in mud than pearls so team your Hunters and Barbour with diamonds when feeding the hens or mucking out the stables.
6. Be extravagant when it comes to knowledge and experience. It never pays to be stingy or penny pinching over books.
7. Crocodile shoes and bags are a must for school visits but alligator is better. It is much easier to ensure the upper hand with teachers and headmistresses in sturdy shiny accessories. Also crocodile shoes have a better chance of surviving the inevitable trudges across fields required on speech days.
8. Only eat oysters in months with an R - the other months are for storing your fur although a light ocelot may be kept on hand for chilly summer evenings.
9. The thank you note is the corner stone of good behavior. Always take the time to send a thank you note after you have stayed with someone, been taken out or shown a special kindness by another.
10. If a man invites you out on a date and suggests going "dutch" or in any way at all insults your finer feelings with gross behavior, do not look shocked or glare as it shows awfully bad breeding! Stand up, gather your belongings elegantly and with great flourish throw his wine stylishly in his face. This is not an excuse to neglect writing a thank you letter afterwards though perhaps a stern letter of complaint to his mother may also be in order.
11. Never slap a man with red hair across the face as they feel no pain - Edward de Bono told me this repeatedly along with a lot of blonde jokes of which I don't think you or anyone else will benefit.
12. Never raise your voice to anyone. It is for this reason that I encouraged you to indulge in linguistic superiority from an early age.
13. Never strike a child especially your own. Limit yourself to chinese burns or tiny pinches but only if they are very dangerously naughty - and never while angry. Nota Bene: you were never dangerously naughty.
14. Anger is terribly aging, as is self pity. Besides you are a Catholic which enables you to gorge yourself on mea culpas and wander proprietorially through luxurious cathedrals.
15. In times of crisis when even family seem inadequate your faith will be of great comfort as will your minks and jewels. A few decades of the rosary and you'll inevitably be wrapped in the boon of sleep.
16. People let you down. Don't obsess over this. Put on your nicest attitude and do something selfless for another.
17. Avoid reading the bible - like most books written by bearded men it is part thriller, part horror. Focus on Our Lady - how more fabulous a role model can a girl have than our Queen of Heaven, who never sullied herself with endless gospels or letters or warnings not to lead blind men the wrong way across a field or whether or not to stone a rapist? She busied herself chatting to angels and didn't even require sperm to bear the fruit of a God/Man. No, the bible is for the most part ghastly and unladylike though perfectly suitable for girls studying theology or misogyny.
18. Never kiss a bearded or moustacheod man. They all smell of yesterday's soup.
19. Remain committed to the double air-kiss regardless in social circumstances. Avoid shaking hands with anyone you don't intend to strike a deal with, it is unfriendly and vaguely threatening to thrust a hand at another in any purely social interaction. Handshaking is the preserve of the businessmen and women when going about their business.
20. You will never be alone. I can't help this. Quite apart from my constant obsessive love and admiration, no Catholic can ever be said to be truly alone for we always have the travelling Greek Chorus following us around questioning our actions and our plans. Embrace this as there is no escape even if you take up with another religion or become atheist.
21. Avoid atheists though many of them are charming. Eventually they will want to argue with you about your faith. Faith has nothing to do with fact any more than religion has to do with God as any Buddhist will attest.
22. Do not marry a Protestant. They do not have romantic souls. Nor do they have a conscience so feel no guilt. Lack of guilt tends to make one rather suburban and dull in argument. Their inability to hold their own in debate and attempting to base viewpoints on facts rather than fancies, can make them petty and bigoted. If one is going to have a religion at all it should have some gravitas and a religion based on a hated of Our Lady and a dislike of fine alter dressings and purple robes with gold threads is nuts and misogynistic. Also your father was a Protestant.
23. Do not make the mistakes I made. I made many and I did so in the hope that you would learn from them. I did not realise this at the time of making said mistakes but I feel it keenly now.
24. Sadly, families frequently excommunicate other members for letting them down - your father's mother is a case in point - yet the Church barely ever troubles itself to excommunicate Catholics. Once baptized, your free to feel as guilty and confused as your fancy. This is comforting in a world increasingly obsessed with certainties.
25. Start your trousse early, you will find it will help develop discipline in your relationships with boys.
26. Dull marriages are to be avoided but they are not deadly nor necessarily cause for divorce. Knitting, embroidery, needlepoint and crosswords can provide a valuable boon as can a flat on Mount Street.
27. If you are going to quarrel with your lover do it over a game of scrabble.
28. Send your children to boarding school from age 11. Families are not always the happiest of environments for children as anyone who was once a child will attest. You and your offspring will both appreciate one another all the more during holidays, half term breaks and exeat weekends.
29. Cultivate tolerance. It does not do to be judgemental on anyone other than oneself. The bad food, dormitory life and the brutal outdoor sports of boarding school all help develop tolerance.
30. Chose a single sex boarding school. Feelings of inadequacy flourish when boys and girls are housed together during the teenage years and they will see plenty of one another during inter-school activities.
31. You will make mistakes. It is not always important to be right, but it is always important to feel in hindsight that you behaved correctly or at least behaved incorrectly with impeccable manners.
32. It is important to always admit you were wrong, even if it is only within the confines of a confessional to a priest who doesn't speak English or Latin. As the rather handsome Alexander Pope said, "To err is human - to forgive is divine". You darling should always be aiming for divine.
33. The Catholic soul is a poetic soul which can make us a little glutinous when it comes to romance. The bells, the smells the spells the whispered secrets in confessionals, the Songs of Solomon, angels and the virgin birth ensures we are slaves to romance. The romantic soul, if not Catholic, often converts as did Oscar Wilde. I'm not sure this always helps. A girl needs romance to keep her feminine. Don't gorge on it, but ensure you always have enough to sustain you. See guide number 22.
34. Retain your mystery and value your privacy. Do not give too much of yourself or your relationships with those you love away. Though we cannot put a price on privacy, we are all broke and damned without it.
35. Say towhit, and verve and vex frequently. Use all and any words that you note falling from use. Keep your language as alive and vivid as your jewels and memories.
36. Cultivate loyalty. Practice on your friends. You will need it as a mother. All children try to shake their parents. Mothers worry. I suspect I worry more than most. This will be a great burden to you but you will never shake me nor my love.
37. Your Great Grandma told me to believe half of what I see and none of what I hear so I shall pass this bit of Irish wisdom your way to do with as you will.
38. Nancy Mitford said, and I concur: "I think housework is far more tiring and frightening than hunting is, no comparison, and yet after hunting we had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework people expect one to go on just as if nothing special had happened." Someone must do housework but they must be rewarded and treated like conquering heroes. For Quentin Crisp - who you may or may not remember meeting in New York as a child - was quite wrong when he said of dust, "after four years it doesn't get any worse"
39. It is a okay to fuss over and spoil your children but do let them dine with you do not become one of those parents who segregate their families into grownups and children. Take them to restaurants, encourage them to order from the menu. When they can speak, listen to them and include them in conversations though not if their dull or irritating of course - though you my darling never were.
40. Never allow yourself to be induced to dine with anyone who holds their knife and fork incorrectly or uses their fork as a spoon. If they can't press their peas onto the back of their fork they should be avoided.
41. Apart from manners try to keep an open mind. I change my mind all the time so it doesn't behove me to defend my opinions too staunchly. It does looks awfully stern when one upholds one's opinions at the expense of good banter.
42. Yes, it is okay to laugh during sex not that I would know as you and your brothers were all immaculately conceived. It is not seemly for parents to make love, have sex or be libidinous; please do remember this fact when you yourself are a parent.
