Lord Bonkers' Diary: Gossip in the Bonkers’ Arms

We join Lord Bonkers for another week at the Hall to find him, though as ready with an apposite quotation as ever, uncharacteristically nettled by criticism in the village.

Monday

“London, to thee I do present the merry month of May,” as the dramatists Beaumont and Fletcher wrote. Except by the time you read this it will not be May at all but June. Used as I have become to the electric internet, I now find the inescapable delay between the submission of these diaries and their appearance in the next Liberator frustrating. Will my observations on, say, the Master of Elibank still be topical when they come out?

If I were not in possession of such an unimpeachable character, moreover, there might be allegations of sharp practice at the press. A reader coming across my suggestion that Rutland Lad is worth following in the 2.30 at Southwell could suspect that it was dropped in after the aforementioned horse strolled home by six lengths. So let me emphasise that I write these lines on a sunny morning in the merry month of May and put an end to the gossip in the Bonkers’ Arms.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.