Here’s a picture of Lillie Langtry in a big hat. Rather splendid, isn’t it? She was a beautiful actress who ran her own production company and starred in She Stoops to Conquer and As You Like It but she was most famed for being the mistress of the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII, a man of gluttonous, lascivious tastes). She was, in short, a naughty Edwardian in a Victorian age. She also used to live at times in The Cadogan Hotel on London’s Sloane Street where throughout the summer on Monday afternoons I will be giving talks and taking questions on Downton Abbey over cups of Earl Grey and cucumber sandwiches. It couldn’t be a more perfect setting, could it?

Tea at the Cadogan is done in partnership with Partridges and is a sumptuous affair with sandwiches, scones with clotted cream and jam, pastries and the famous Chelsea Bun.

For details on dates and how to buy tickets, please see here.

Rather thrilled to announce that I am the guest speaker for afternoon tea in the elegant Sculpture Gallery at Woburn Abbey on July 17. There aren’t many places you can go on safari to gawp at the gorillas and then go on to hear the inside scoop on the Dowager Countess over cucumber sandwiches…

All the deets are here. Please do join us!

More details and tickets available here: Chewton Glen

News coming up about a series of afternoon teas and talks at the Cadogan Hotel in London all this summer… Watch this space. Yes, this very one.

*The Eton boys, for me, have probably done the best parody of Gangnam Style. Watch it here. Ha haa.

Matt Haig currently has a novel out (‘The Humans’ – I haven’t read it but I’m going to) and he frequently shares funny Facebook posts, which for reasons you will see, I read as frequently as he puts them up, and has written some great blogs for BookTrust. This is the latest and… well, it made me laugh and if any of you are reading this blog for tips on being a writer, or wondering what a writer’s life is really like… This is probably the best revelation you’ll find.

Elsewhere, Matt has written about the wonder of being a writer – and it’s true that on the day that you write well, or someone else tells you that you write well, that it’s as if the sun shone everywhere and Smarties grew on trees. There’s no better feeling. But ecstasy is necessarily rare, and so are the writer’s high points.

Mind you, I’m still doing it. I know, I’m very lucky.

Read Matt Haig’s blog here: 10 Reasons Not To Be A Writer

NOSTALGIA. This is the weirdest. It hits you like a child’s swing on the back of your head. One minute you’re looking at photos from your university days and saying how it only feels like last week and no-one looks any older even though it’s ten years ago; the next you’re staring at pictures of the naive children of yesteryear, wondering if you can even remember what it felt like to be that person, so bright-eyed and unknowing of what life was going to turn out like.

Furthermore, because everything has changed so fast in our lifetime, the nostalgia is extreme and early. Our grandparents hit their 70s before they started wallowing in memories about life before TV, fax machines and setting video recorders (I don’t think they ever worked out how to record something while they were out, the height of tech-decadence then – my parents only just about did it; and my grandfather always turned the fax machine off because he thought the red standby light would set fire to the house if it got too hot from being on. But he was born in 1912, so these kind of thought processes were entirely forgiveable). Now, I’m – just – the right side of 40, and I’m talking about the world when I wrote cheques, had no answerphone, had to stand by the phone without walking anywhere if I wanted to talk into it, only read books in paper form, had no internet and ate Wagon Wheels as if I was a relic from the Victorian era who had lived a bizarrely long life and witnessed a century of change. Because all that change in 100 years would be amazing but comprehensible. In just 20 years it’s bonkers. So that makes me feel even older.

WRINKLES. I mind these less than I thought I would. Possibly it’s because they’re not so bad yet. Possibly it’s because I have a rule never to smile at myself in the mirror. Still, I know that if I lose weight, my waist will look better but my neck won’t. I spent $83 on a face serum recently. That was a first and almost certainly not a last (it’s made a difference, it really has!).

HAIR. Ugh. Much dryer. I have to get serious about weekly conditioning masks. I have to have expensive haircuts and colour (home-dye kits, I have discovered, work for about a year and then suddenly go right off). I had a very pricey blow dry the other week, for a photoshoot, and my husband has hardly stopped raving about it. These kind of things you have to do – you can’t get away with cheap and cheerful fixes anymore. It’s not that you necessarily look terrible if you go cut-price, but if you want to look amazing, you have to pay.

CLOTHES. For the moment, we can carry on as we are more or less. I think it’s over 50 that the game changes (also, I need more time to save up). I feel as if I’m still wearing the sort of clothes I wore when I was 12. Mind you, I was kind of old for my age then, and now, while I’m not shopping in Top Shop for entire outfits, I probably go to a lot of the same places that teenagers go to – but that’s because mothers and daughters go to the same shops (Zara, Whistles, Jigsaw). I’d like to be exclusively buying expensively tailored dresses from Prada and Preen, or only wearing Louboutins or something but I don’t have the cash or borrowing power. What has changed is that I know my shape, I know what suits me, and I don’t deviate from it no matter how trendy or appealing the brightly printed tulip skirt may be. I don’t even need to try things on in a changing room to know whether it will work. This is a bonus.

ACCESSORIES. I think there’s something about turning 40 that makes you wear large silver or gold cuffs on your wrists from hereon in. Also, all bags must be made from ‘real’ fabric, whether cotton or leather. Plastic just will not do.

MURDER MYSTERIES. Couldn’t have been less interested in these last year. I would like to say this has changed because there are some great new murder mysteries about – I like to snuggle up on the sofa to watch Endeavour (‘Morse’ as a young man in the 1950s), or read Gillian Flynn (‘Gone Girl’) – but frankly, Poirot or Miss Marple would do just as well.

SUDOKU. No longer just a way to kill 20 minutes on the train but an exercise to ‘stave off dementia’.

PARENTS. You still have them, mostly (I still have my dad). You’re more inclined to forgive them for being idiotic but perhaps not yet inclined to indulge their whims. This more or less translates as: I’ll still borrow money off you but I won’t worry yet about paying it back. If they borrow money off you, on the other hand, you’ll charge interest.

DEBT. You still have this. You probably have just as much as you did ten years ago, only now you’re actually concentrating on paying it off. Even the mortgage deadline doesn’t seem that far away anymore. Overdrafts are less ‘free money’ and more ‘monthly charges’.

ACCOUNTANT. Yes, you even have one of these.

LAWYER. Not yet. Though you really should get round to writing your will soon.

CHILDREN. You may have at least one of these and if you have more they may not be yours because, like me, you married someone much older with kids already. Unlike our parents’ generation however, you hit 40 with toddlers in tow. When my dad turned 40, I went to his party and I was wearing stretch shiny jeans and an off-the-shoulder white top (told you I was old for 12); at midnight, I was sent to bed in our neighbours’ house and next day listened, enthralled, to tales of my godfather having a long conversation with our cat before being carried into the kitchen where coffee was poured into him. For my 40th, my son will be in bed at 7pm and will never learn of what went on while he slept.

IRONING. No longer something that other people do.

ME, MYSELF AND I. The really great thing about turning 40 is that you know you are you and that’s not going to change, and you’re OK with that. I have more confidence now walking into a roomful of strangers. A small measure of professional success has definitely helped with that. But also, you no longer worry about impressing everyone. You can’t make everyone love you or even like you – and that’s OK, too. My dad always said the three ages of man are: At 20 you are desperately trying to fit in with everyone else. At 30 you decide you don’t care what anyone else thinks. At 40, you realise no-one is thinking about you anyway.

Hah.

NB This is full of generalisations. But generalisations are fun.

• I have talked for seven and a half hours in total.
• And signed hundreds of books.
• Had my photo taken with a lot of people. There are a lot of bad photos of me out there right now.
• Had scrambled eggs, blueberry pancakes, crispy bacon, waffles and pints of coffee. For breakfast. This morning.
• Have also had the dubious pleasures of peanut butter pie, key lime pie and raspberry sundae. But not all at once. Except for last night.
• Been to Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach, Miami, Jupiter Island, Jacksonville, Sea Island and Des Moines (and now going home via Chicago). That’s four states in nine days: Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Chicago.
• [Postscript amend: Chicago is not a state. Illinois is what I meant. Honest.]
• Presidential campaign tours must be hard work.
• Americans still believe that Marilyn Monroe is the most beautiful woman that ever lived.
• Nobody is interested in the death of Margaret Thatcher. They did not admire her. They largely did not even know who she was.
• Britain is a small island off the north coast of Europe.
• There are ads on TV and in the magazines for drugs of all kinds: anti-depressants, severe plaque psoriasis, halitosis. This is strange but it gets even stranger when the camera is panning over ‘America’s Next Top Model’ Candidee English tossing back her blonde extensions and enjoying her new psoriasis-free skin with a voiceover in the monotone that is supposed to indicate ‘small print’: “Safety and effectiveness have not been proved beyond two years. This may cause cancer. Discuss with your doctor if you have cancer.”
• I haven’t seen anything older than a hundred years except for the residents of Palm Beach, where it’s hard to find anybody who can walk and eat unaided. Miami is populated by the very old and the very gay, all sharing their love of big hair, Botox and tans.
• (Dear Palm Beach – see NB above. Please invite me back)
• They are funny – cue the airline steward on Southwest Airlines (say the following to yourself in a Texan drawl): “As you all know, smoking has been banned FOREVER. If you really want to smoke that bad, walk out on to the wing. That’ll be the in-flight entertainment….In the event of an emergency, if you are travelling with a child – though God knows why you would want to do that – attend to your own mask first. If you are travelling with someone who is acting like a child, that’s your own freaking problem.” And at the end of the flight, when the light pinged. “Awlright. Get off.”
• Everything feels so big – roads, trucks, horizons, buildings, coffee cups.
• Nothing so big as my stomach – apparently no meal is complete unless it contains at least one of the following options, but preferably all four: cheese, gloopy sauce of indeterminate flavour, deep fried batter, corn syrup. I ordered steak salad last night – it came with blue cheese, deep fried onion rings, fried potatoes and a hunk of bread.
• There is quite an evenly spread mix of whites and non-whites on TV, also in senior management (as evidenced in hotels, venues etc) and also amongst the audiences I met. But all the low-grade jobs – porters, cleaners, chambermaids – were exclusively held by non-whites. (If you say ‘black’ here it means ‘Afro-American’).
• Their newspapers are terrible – hard to read, little international news, badly designed.
• Ditto the news shows which appear to choose one major story – North Korea, the Boston Marathon bombings – and talk about them for 48 hours. A ticker tape of news running along the bottom of the screen is the only way to find out that anything else has happened.
• Their newsreaders all look like contestants from Miss World 1999.
• The men are quite frequently ridiculously good-looking, especially the silver-haired limo drivers. You never saw so many square jaws as in the taxi queue.
• They are generous, kind and welcoming.
• They are free with their compliments. I have been told how cute I am, how gracious, how nice, how much fun etc. This could all quite easily go to one’s head except for the fact that I cannot believe a single word of it. I don’t know if this is because I am British or because I am suspicious when there’s no change of tone. If they were rude about one thing in front of me, I’d be more inclined to believe they didn’t parrot polite phrases. Still, I’m not complaining – it’s nice to hear.
• And some of it’s true. If someone wishes you a great day, quite often you have one. At the very least you wish them one back. I can’t help but feeling London taxi drivers might benefit from this small point of knowledge.
• Even the most basic hotel rooms have: WIFI, an iron and board, a hairdryer, huge TV, aircon.
• It is near-impossible to find anyone to do your hair in Fort Lauderdale. I did all my own hair this week, which partly accounts for the bad photos.
• Don’t say blow-dry, say blow-out.
• Their service is the best in the world. No kidding. But you pay for it – I’ve spent a hundred bucks in tips.
• Sex is never in the air. They don’t flirt. I guess it’s been litigated out of them. Or I just ate too many of those goddamn blueberry pancakes.
• It’s been great. I’m happy to go home. Thank you, America.

My relationship with food now is on the whole a fairly balanced one, I like to think. Balanced, that is, relative to being a woman and, furthermore, one who is occasionally on public view. Every now and again I’ll lose weight through some faddish thing, the Dukan diet or an Ayurvedic detox, then keep an eye on things, then take the eye right off the ball until a look at the scales sends me back to Googling ‘lose a stone in a fortnight’. But my shape never changes hugely and I live, as most do, wishing I was about half a stone lighter, took a bit more exercise and had a free pass to a salon so that I never had to wash my own hair.

I think my generation – 70s kids – was probably the last to enjoy a childhood where food was nothing but simple pleasures. The 70s hit that magic period before paranoia set in about toxins and weight:  E-numbers (the blight of my sister’s childhood; she was an 80s baby), organic hype, local food, Jamie’s chickens, corn syrup, Gywneth Paltrow… the myriad of edible elements we worry about on a daily basis in 2013. Pre-1970s food wasn’t so great either: children ate what they were given and what they were given was largely over-boiled vegetables and suet puddings. My mother, born in 1949, remembered the intoxicating arrival of spaghetti, muesli and yoghurt. My father’s favourite food is mushy peas, because it was something digestible that he was served at school.

Food fads and diets, of course, are nothing new. My grandmother swore by half a grapefruit every morning as a magical solution to burning off calories eaten later. She used to tell me of Parisian models in the 1950s fed pills by their agencies – one left her pills on the mantelpiece, only to find tapeworms crawling out of them a few days later. Physical exercise was considered extremely important to many women born in the 1920s and 1930s, with many doing quick daily routines when they got up in the morning. At the turn of the last century, corsets might have helped with creating an ultra-flat stomach but they were a cruel reminder of any second helpings. You would be laced into your corset by a helper the first time and that shape would be retained so that you could hook yourself in thereafter: it would be very uncomfortable to wear if you got any bigger and if you didn’t have a lady’s maid to hand to let it out a bit, you’d be constrained all day.

So. Back to the butterscotch sauce. Hot and sweet. Too much of it on my ice-cream, with a small cup on the side of an extra helping. This was my mother’s treat on a Wednesday night. Actually, on any night. Every supper had puddings with names as sickly as their high-sugar content: Angel’s Delight, Viennetta ice-cream, Spotted Dick, Bread & Butter pudding, Apple Brown Betty, rhubarb crumble, mashed banana with brown sugar and cream, custard on anything or on its own. Never a yoghurt, not even a fruity one, let alone plain and unsweetened, or slices of fruit or even a cracker and cheese. But strawberry jelly, Arctic Roll, Neapolitan ice-cream, pancakes with lemon and white caster sugar. Each pudding came one shade or three of the artificially enhanced rainbow. Glutinous lashings of fructose syrup on the tinned peaches filled each mouthful, expanding within, coating my tongue in its clingy texture, each tooth wrapped and shiny from chowing down nightly on mouthfuls of sucrose. Despite faithfully brushing my teeth twice a day, I had five fillings and two gold teeth by the time I was 13 years old. (To put this in perspective, my nearly-15-year-old stepson has no fillings and is yet to lose all his milk teeth.) “No need for braces,” my dentist would smile brightly. “Your teeth are perfectly straight.” That was considered a win.

I think puddings, for my mother, were a sign of love. Not that love wasn’t lavished on us daily, in a thousand different ways, but because every night she had the power to bestow a treat, and this pleased her. To not give a treat would not have been seen as, say, levelling out the balance so that it could be a treat by the terms of its definition (something warmly appreciated thanks to its occasional appearance) – no, to not give a treat would be to be strict, or boring, or following a discipline of denial. Moderation, when it came to love, was not my mother’s line.

Which was not to say that she was greedy. I mean, she dieted. She was usually a little heavier than she’d like to be but she knew that she only had to stop the treats and she’d be fine. She was funny, very beautiful and glamorous – I don’t think anyone except her noticed the little extra on her hips. Sometimes there would be a brief enthusiasm for the latest fad – callisthenics (which appealed at first because it was based on doing only tiny movements; it soon wore off because you had to do hundreds of them); Rosemary Conley’s Hip & Thigh Diet; some strange green powdered drink sent over from the US; the pineapple diet, in which you ate nothing but pineapples and the weight fell off but your mouth felt blistered and sore.

When not on the diet – and even when she was on one, she still gave me the same food – we had our usual repertoire. Frosties for breakfast, then toast thickly spread with butter and marmalade. School lunch (mint-green custard has always stuck in my mind). Home from school, I’d be rewarded for my toil and strife with crumpets spread with Golden Syrup, toast and marmite, French Fancies and ginger nut biscuits. Supper was more or less on rotation and almost everything was some sort of meat with mashed potatoes: Shepherd’s Pie, Corned Beef Hash, Barbecued Spare Ribs, Fray Bentos pies, lamb chops…followed, (un)naturally enough, by pudding. The only change was on Friday nights, which always meant fish, but not fish so that you could actually recognise it. Smoked haddock or squares of cod would be disguised in fish cakes, kedgeree or a quirky fish pie which was topped with crisps and grated cheese. Most things got slightly burnt: “Charcoal is very good for cleaning out the insides,” she’d say. I still like burnt toast. Before bed we’d have a mug of hot Ovaltine. The arrival of the microwave was enthusiastically welcomed.

Recalling it all now, I wonder that she didn’t just pour me three bowls of sugar a day and be done with it.

Weirdly, however, right alongside all this was a new health consciousness. My mother had Multiple Sclerosis and diet was supposed to help her. This took us to the new and rare health food shops where every single packet appeared to contain sawdust and often tasted just as exciting.

Each morning, the whole family had to ingest several enormous vitamin pills – why were they so BIG in those days? – that came out of sweet-jar sized dark brown bottles. Mum was vegetarian for a few years, off and on, in the 1970s. It was a hard time not to eat meat – you certainly couldn’t maintain it if you went to anyone else’s house for dinner (“If I chop up the bacon very small,” said her mother-in-law, “could you still have the salad?”) and you’d have to invent a meat-free option on a restaurant menu as it wouldn’t be specially put on there. At home we ate a lot of recipes from Crank’s (the only vegetarian restaurant in existence), the basis of each dish being either pasta, potatoes or lentils, except on high days and holidays when you’d have all three at once. Everything would be covered in white sauce. Nut roast for Sunday lunch became rather a favourite. Samosas were my reward for helping in the supermarket and I remember becoming very fond of Sesame Snap bars and carob chocolate. Even now, I prefer brown rice and wholemeal bread…so long as it’s followed by cheap vanilla ice-cream.

I only remember it all as being very tasty. Others thought so too, as my mother apparently had a reputation amongst her friends as being something of a cook, albeit one who had never so much as clapped eyes on a bottle of olive oil. If you were invited to a dinner party more than once you knew, with what she presumably hoped was reassuring familiarity, what you would be served. G&Ts on arrival, with Bombay Mix and Twiglets handed out by me. (Waitressing duties over, a thrilling glimpse of the guests having been caught, I’d be sent to bed.) Smoked mackerel pate to start (fish mashed with cream cheese); cheese souffle with salad followed by a pudding from her favourite recipe book, ‘Darling, You Shouldn’t Have Gone To So Much Trouble’, which consisted entirely of dishes which were a cheat of some sort, usually involving tinned salmon. The dinner party pud was Greek yoghurt into which spoonfuls of lemon curd had been stirred, then garnished with slices of kiwi. There would be masses of wine, from a box (I liked to blow up the silver bags the next day, for use as stylish cushions, so long as the tap was kept hidden underneath) and smoking throughout. There’d be a joint with the coffee.

Despite all this, or maybe because of it, I was a slim child, rarely ill once I’d grown out of the childhood illness phase. It wasn’t what we’d do today, but it was just fine then. Without coming over all Louisa May Alcock, every morsel was served with love. And that kept us happy and healthy. I’ll take that over Agave Syrup any day.

Just a short clip of me talking about The Chronicles of Downton Abbey, with behind-the-scenes tidbits, for WPBT2.

Watch here.

I’ve been living in the country (note: posh* people never say ‘countryside’) for nearly three months now and I’ve always said that it takes about that long to get used to anything new – relationship, job, house. After three months you should have that inward sigh of small happiness when you get within a certain distance of the front door. That safe feeling you have when at home begins to extend to a further point – the last street corner you turn, the bus stop you get off at – where you feel ‘if anything tries to get me now, I’ll be ok’. (Funny really we should feel like this when most accidents happen within a three mile radius of your home.) You should have got your bearings now too. You know where the nearest dry cleaners is; you’ve finally registered with the doctor. At work after three months, you’ve sussed the quickest commute, you know the right bit of platform to stand on to get your preferred tube carriage. And in a relationship, three months is pretty much the point at which you know whether it’s a goer or not, how many sugars they like in their tea and which friends of yours they don’t like much.

So here I am and yes, I’ve got the dry cleaner sorted. Got my Waitrose layout nailed and know the best place to buy sausages. I’ve met the neighbours, too. In fact, I met my neighbour the very first night I was in the house, when she popped round with a card and a bottle of wine, because that’s how they do things in the country. I remember wanting to invite all my neighbours round for a drink when I first bought my flat in Notting Hill, one of nine in a converted house. “Don’t,” said a friend. “No one will come and they’ll earmark you as a nutter.” Which was probably true. We all know you don’t say hello to people in the city. The shorthand for ‘goofball character’ or ‘alien from outer space recently landed in New York’ is always achieved by having said weirdo/alien relentlessly smile at all the passersby who bury their faces even further into their turned up collars. In fact, so used to this was I that when I first got together with my now-husband, then living in Suffolk, after one walk I remarked that he seemed to know an awful lot of people because he’d said hello to everyone we’d passed.

A Londoner born and bred I grew to love the anonymity the city gave me. Round my flat, where I lived for almost eight years, I had enough local friendliness – the launderette, the cafe that knew how I liked my coffee, the market stalls on a Friday – but also the ability to disappear on a whim. No one to question my whereabouts, my mood or just what I was doing having breakfast with this bloke when I’d been having breakfast with quite another last weekend. The thought of losing all this to a village life that might be cosy and supportive but also nosey, bigoted and judgemental frightened me out of my cynical urban wits.

I was wrong.

First of all, we are not really in a villagey-village, although there’s one nearby. So I don’t feel in any way watched. But even if we were, I doubt there would be many who would take much notice. Turns out, people who live in the country, have a life too, you know? And, what’s more, I’m not sure I would mind all that much even if they did notice. After a lifetime of strangers on the street turning away if you ever so much as hint at needing some help – falling over, say, and bleeding – it’s actually been a rather surprising comfort to find that I like people caring. Thanks to utter strangers taking a kind interest in me, I have real, live neighbours who do things like give my son presents, buy me tickets for the local literary festival and bring round gluten-free brownies (I don’t need them, but they do). I had a sitting-room full of people I had never so much as heard of three months ago, let alone met, and I was truly happy to have them there. That’s been a new one on me. Just as you think you know yourself…

Secondly, the thing of physical proximity, the feeling of being invaded is much, much worse in the city. I only realised this when I got the train down yesterday and then had to get a packed tube, having stupidly coincided my cross-city trip with rush hour, and found myself nose-to-armpit with both savoury and unsavoury types. Nothing was threatening it was just a bit, you know, close. It’s not just that the country has wide open spaces and to bump into someone on a walk you’d have to target them with the efficiency of a drone, it’s the fact that there’s none of that arty-farty city kissing and hugging either. We all nod hello and maybe shake hands first time, but that’s about it. Passing in the car might merit a wave, but more likely a lifted finger or two from the steering wheel and a barely perceptible nod. All acquaintances and best friends are treated alike. It’s not unfriendly, not at all – it’s just a respectful distance. God, I love it. And my predilection for smattering even a note for the milkman with xxx’s is being shown in comic relief here. My new bezzie mate here may have told me the ins and outs of her marriage but she’s not put so much as an x at the end of a text to me.

There is one unexpected thing, however. I’ve noticed that the class divide is blown much wider in the country. That great cliche, the melting-pot of London, is true. When everyone’s a blow-in, there are millions of people who are reinventing their story, building their platform, ironing out their accents and all living cheek-by-jowl. We all live on the same street, go to the same schools (apart from that tiny percentage that go to very exclusive ones), travel on the same tubes and buses, see the same movies, eat at the same restaurants. Of course you can see class divides in London, but out in the country it feels much more pronounced. I think it’s partly the size of the houses, partly the rustic accents are thrown into sharper relief (not so many BBC voices here). It’s harder to pass yourself off as proper country, than it is to be a Dalston trendy, say, within a week of arriving. (I know I’m failing in keeping up appearances out here but then, I’m not trying. More on the clothes and other giveaways another time, I’m still spotting them.)

I’m not in what many would call proper country anyway – it’s ‘lunch-country’ (you can get here and back from London just for lunch). I’m sure in Devon or Dorset it would be a different story (anyone care to enlighten me?) and certainly in Oxfordshire, most of the people I’ve met are ex-London and still say they’re going ‘up to town’ pretty frequently, and they don’t mean Abingdon or Oxford. But, still, that’s how it’s been for me. The best thing I can say? I’m pleased I made the move. So thank you neighbours. See you in the pub later.

 *Hmmm. I’m not THAT posh. But, anyway.