Lady of the Manor

In the novels read in my adolescence and various PBS/BBC productions viewed now, the lady of the manor spends her mornings maintaining correspondence and planning menus (while the household staff does the grungy stuff). 

How civilized and somehow effete and, I thought, archaic. 

But how archaic? It’s now almost 10 a.m. and I have accomplished nothing except to catch up with email and Facebook (and I’d catch up with Twitter and Linked-In if I could remember how to do that). Plus check my bank balance and pay bills.

Times change. And don’t. We still maintain connections – one way or another – because we need them. Our current versions are not as elegant, nor as profound, as our predecessors and it is highly unlikely that our messages will ever be collected in published volumes to reveal to posterity the depth – or shallowness – of lives in the twenty-first century. 

 Still, it is now past 10 a.m. and well past time for me to write the essays I had planned.

But there are significant differences:  no one has done anything about the grungy stuff. (Or planned a single menu.)

Ah well.