Up and at it at 6.08.  Evidence that Lady K is back on top form?  Sadly not, merely the result of a friend in Thailand deciding that I would welcome a text with pictures of her husband and a request to remind her of what I gave her for her birthday – a week ago.  She will claim jet lag but I draw immense satisfaction from the knowledge that although she is ten years younger, something she does frequently remember, she is clearly already  in possession of few of her marbles than I am.

Back to the only real item of interest this week,  given that I am going to,spare you details of the conversation I had with the Head of Making Traffic Even Worse at the local council.  It turns out the whole scheme (A 20 mph speed limit on every road in the borough) is funded by Transport for London in an attempt to make car travel so unbearable that we take to the buses.  What a brilliant scheme. And what could possibly go wrong?

Much more importantly I am in a state of shock and awe and I speak as a woman who thought Niagara Falls was over-rated.  The exhibition, The Lost Treasures of Horace Walpole,  has finally opened at Strawberry Hill House, or it will later today if you want to be slavishly accurate; not something that ever bothers me.  Leader of fashion that I am, I have already been twice.  It was described by one journalist as one of the ten best things he had ever seen and this was NOT the Culture Correspondent of the Sun.   Jaw dropping, people, an absolute MUST SEE.

When I first went to the house over twenty years ago, it was full of filing cabinets and strip lighting, with the ‘damask’ hanging off the walls.  After years of fund raising and restoration we opened in 2010 with a magical transformation.  The house was beautiful but empty.  Since then several items, or replicas, have returned, the contents having been scattered to the four corners of the earth in a sale in 1842. But now, like the Terminator, they are back.  Not everything but about 140 items and the effect is astonishing.  Don’t do anything else today, don’t get up, don’t make coffee, do absolutely nothing until you’ve booked a ticket. Our poor ugly duckling turns out to be the most beautiful swan in the world.

And buy an umbrella in the gift shop.  They’re adorable.

At the other end of the spectrum of pleasure I visited the Oceania exhibition at the Royal Academy.  Not really worth a detour, even though you can get in free if you happen to have a New Zealand passport.  I did get a very nice email from the management when I told them that in their cafe, which has no signage, it takes three members of staff twelve minutes to dust the Kit Kats and finally get round to serving a coffee, information which I will be sharing with my 127,000 followers on Trip Advisor.

I related this sorry tale to the cafe manager at Strawberry Hill  and asked him what would become of his staff if he got a similar complaint.  Let’s just say I am pretty certain it could never happen.  Yet another reason to go. See you there.