Dyrham Park

The National Trust has taken to sending us begging letters asking us to support this or that special appeal, which is fair enough. We are members and I not mind them passing the begging bowl around from time to time. But the latest one did catch my eye and not in the way intended. It was asking us to support the future of somewhere called Dyrham Park, of which I had not previously heard and a bank instruction was attached for our convenience - and it was this last which caught my eye, suggesting that we gift £95, £110, £115 or other. How did they come to think that suggesting these rather odd amounts would pull in the lucre? Was the idea to plant in our minds the idea that some amount around the £100 mark would be acceptable? Whatever, the effect on me was rather off-putting, it reading rather like an instruction to donate that sort of amount; I was not being offered a real choice in the way that such letters more usually do.

So no donation on this occasion.

I am also led to wonder about the capacity of the country for such places. Much ink is spilt on the right number of large shops - for which we may now have actually reached saturation point, with the large operators like Sainsbury's and their like, actually starting to slow down their building programmes - but not so much is spilt on the right number of stately homes, for which the National Trust is something of a monopoly provider. But I do recall a National Trust rule which says that each of their properties has to be self sustaining with no cross subsidies from the successful ones to the not so successful ones, a rule which goes some way to mitigate any untoward effects of their monopoly.

I don't know whether the rule extends to a property being allowed to go under if it does not cut the mustard; I have never heard of such a thing. And what about the deed which conveyed the thing to the Trust in the first place: does that allow of disposal to a third party (a golf course? See 6th January) or are they lumbered with it, given that they accepted it in the first place, in perpetuity? Is there any room for changing their minds? For allowing that they made a mistake?

PS: being picky, the phrase on the instruction 'vital work' also irritates. It is not as if we are erecting flood defenses at Chertsey, we are preserving just another stately pile. Just another curiously attractive relic of the unequal past as we sail into an increasingly unequal future, not exactly a vital organ.