It is my opinion that there is no place on earth more uncomfortable than London during a heat wave. I should probably qualify this by confessing that I have never gone up the Congo River into the Heart of Darkness with Conrad, nor have I crossed the Sahara by camel. But at least people venturing to those parts are prepared to be uncomfortable. London is so seldom even vaguely warm that we are always caught completely unprepared. The tube turns into a good imitation of the infamous Black Hole of Calcutta and the smell of unwashed armpits, strap-hanging inches from one’s face, is overwhelming.

You may be wondering whether members of the royal family frequently ride on the underground. The answer, of course, is no. My austere relatives King George V and Queen Mary would have only the vaguest idea of what the tube train was. Of course, I am only thirty-fourth in line to the throne, and I am probably the only member of my family who was at that moment penniless and trying to survive on her own, in London, without servants. So let me introduce myself before we continue. My full name is Lady Victoria Georgiana Charlotte Eugenie of Glen Garry and Rannoch. My grandmother was the least attractive of Queen Victoria’s many daughters, judging by those early photographs I’ve seen of her. But then those old photographs did tend to make most people look grouchy, didn’t they? Anyway, no proposals from kaisers or kings were forthcoming for her, so she was hitched to a Scottish duke and lived at Castle Rannoch, in remotest Scotland, until she died of fresh air and boredom.

My brother, Binky, is the current duke. He’s also pretty much penniless, our father having lost the last of the family fortune in the great crash of ’29, before shooting himself on the moors and saddling Binky with horrendous death duties. At least Binky’s got the estate with the home farm and the huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’, as the landed gentry are wont to say, so he’s not exactly starving. I’ve been living on baked beans, toast and tea. I was raised with no skills other than passable French, knowing how to walk with a book on my head and where to seat a bishop at a dinner table. Hardly enough to tempt a prospective employer, if getting an ordinary job were not frowned upon for someone in my position. I tried it once—the cosmetics counter at Harrods. I lasted all of four hours.