Oily fish

Great excitement here, as preparations continue for the Summer Fete, which this year is to be an alternative arts festival. This is because Sir Leslie, my elder brother, needs to raise a million quid to do Phuckwhitt Hall up a bit. The roof is leaking like my bladder. One of the worst things about getting old is that you're up and down all night like a whore's knickers.
Frankly, Leslie's hoping to have a bit left over from the roof restoration fund so he can slope off for a couple of months in Tunis this winter with dear old Peter Mandelson and some young friends. Leslie and Peter were at Magdelene together, and their annual reading party is a tradition that they have kept going for almost fifty years. But Tunis costs, what with one thing and another, so Leslies opening the grounds the weekend after next to five thousand paying customers. Terribly exciting. I've been roped in to help, of course, because I'm the expert on the counter culture. My job is to book the acts, and I can tell you that we've got a pretty exciting line up. Just who we've got coming will have to remain a secret until nearer the time, so that... well, I'm not sure really. They do it at Glastonbury, and it seems to work for them, so I suggested that we do the same, and Sir Leslie concurred. A clue; I was once importuned by our headliner in a cottage off the Fulham Palace Road.
Old Leslie's a brick. He's paid the rent on the Brewer Street flat for years. He always had a soft spot for Mimsy, and they used occasionally to holiday together while I struggled with my Muse in her Earl's Court bed-sitting room. After his wife Imogen died a few years back, he grew lonely rattling round the old ancestral home, and pretty much insisted that I spend as much time here as I like. He took me out today for lunch at The Stagg in Titley, which is the only pub in Britain with a Michelin star, and I had turbot, which was very good. Fish cookery has taken a turn for the better in this country since President-For-Life Blair came to power, I'll give him that.
I remember sitting with Larkin, years ago, in a little fish and chip shop in Goole where we had gone for a day's excursion out from Hull. I had the haddock, while Larkin nibbled at a piece of rock salmon, as it was known then. Huss, they call it now, but it's dogfish, really. In the war we had much worse, and Larkin told the story of how he hid a piece of snoek inside his knickerbockers. I never had it, as Bedales was vegetarian, but I rather liked dried egg.
Excuse me if you will.... I am called to the telephone....