The Duchess of Brighton, the next day.

Seeing this today for the first time, it occurs to me that having saved her home with the movie rental a whole new tableau opens for her.

I picture her commencing to grow mazes of magic mushrooms in the dark basements of the manor, ganja in the flower beds behind the house, and importing varied pharmaceuticals in wholesale quantities.

She changes her regular apparel to rose-tinted sunglasses, a Mexican serape, and Birkenstocks. Her home soon becomes a regular haunt of such as the Rolling Stones and Timothy Leary, for the drugs and also for the kinky sex. She is generally regarded as the grandmother-figure of the British counter-culture.

Go granny go.

Not many can say they stole a film from Burton and Taylor. I'd like to think Liz and Dick got a good-natured laugh out of that.

and a PS. The airline staff lady serving the VIPs in the waiting lounge looked and sounded so familiar, but I couldn't put her face to anything. Looking her up in a few years she would be cast as Lady Prudence Fairfax in Upstairs Downstairs. Sort of a less lethal prototype to the Duchess that Maggie Smith now plays on Downton Abby.