Mimi

To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]

Dear Clare

I’m really sorry that the school secretary wasn’t more helpful. My advice is, persevere. Write a letter addressed to Doc H and copied to the sec saying you only bought the house on the communal garden because you wanted to send a child to Ponsonby, and your life won’t be worth living unless you can at least look round. Which may not work, but has the small merit of being true (and therefore marginally more persuasive than most of the intergalactic bollocks desperate, pushy parents come up with when they are trying to get their children in).

I can’t believe she wouldn’t put you down even on the waiting list, though. My instinct is to keep going. Eve is doubtless told by Doc H to say the waiting list is closed till Kingdom Come to all the parents. Then the usual procedure is, he looks at the names and cherry-picks out the ones he’s heard of and wants to pal up with.

It’s astonishing how heads who say that their school is completely chocker, lists closed, can always find a place for the child of a supermodel/Gazprom oligarch/international celebrity, so never take no as an answer. Write. Ring. Doorstep. Get Gideon involved. All heads love nothing more than to see alpha fathers begging and pleading on behalf of a blastocyte. It’s one of the things that gives their life most meaning.

I am ready to step in – not that I carry much clout. Just let me know.

As you asked, well… moving to the country and leaving London is just as havoc-making as moving to, say, Kandahar, with the only real difference being that if you only move to the shires rather than to Afghanistan, you get no offers of sympathy or help and no armed protection when you leave the house.

Plus you only exchange one set of tribes/cliques for another. In Notting Hill, it was bankers, killer mummies, Americans, high-rolling creatives. Whereas here there are three distinct groups:

1. The ur-villagers, who have lived and worked in Dorset all their life, who can’t afford to shop or eat organic, and drive old bangers that still run on petrol, rather than electricity or corn-oil, and whose children burn stuff/torture hedgehogs/sniff glue in the absence of anything else to do.

2. The green nomads/eco Nazis in Spodden’s Hatch, whose penitential, low-impact lifestyle off the grid is a full-time job and whose lives represent a permanent rebuke to…

3. The ‘agrivistes’: you know, the super-rich noovs who’ve been mopping up their bonuses with everything that’s come on the market for years, sight unseen, who use their country estates, with their gamekeeper’s cottages and lodges and so on, as vast playpens, and put their own staff into the cottages that locals can’t begin to afford to buy, and helipads and gyms and pools into the extensive grounds. If you look closely, all their Humvees, Range Rovers and so on have Kensington and Chelsea residents’ parking permits stuck to their windscreens, so in fact, this £5 million spread is only somewhere they can ‘split’ to, to ‘decompress’, and only if they feel like it, at weekends.