A few words on rabble-rousing blue stockings...

Her Ladyship,  The Honorable Antonia De Montfort (Court Correspondent) writes...

As that dreadful greyish swarm of feminine mediocrity staggered and surged down Fleet Street, I uttered those fateful words...

"Vulgar, Vulgar, Vulgar"

The most exquisitely well connected Court-Correspondent in England!

I spake...to my fair companion Countess Fifi La Chapelle while perched on the Lord Chief Justice's Mahogony Bureau. We were surrounded by the paper petitions of the various inbreds and simpletons who throng this uncouth nation. Fifi fanned her exquisite visage with a commoner's Death Certificate before tossing it casually out of the window onto the bonnet of a grim-faced Suffragette.

"Ah Mon Dieu.. and the smell!" She winced prettily...

We were not referring to that dreadful march... (the cessation of which was our current endeavour. Employing droit du seigneur we had stormed his Lordship's office to demand immediate rifle fire!) No I referred to that ill-smelling dwarf-queen Victoria, with whom I had to spend a disagreeable hour this morning at St James's Palace.

"Vulgar shoes, vulgar hair and yes the smell.. ha...week old Turnip soup!"

A pointed pause..."I am sorry ma chere Antonia.. Qu'est que Turnip Soup?"

I blushed, and endured a mili-second of agonising self-doubt... Countess Fifi is perhaps the only person alive who can (momentarily) make me feel "démodé" and "nouveau..."

I flashed back... "You mean you have not heard of that stinking charlatan Signore Turnip Soup.. he performed at the Stuttgart Opera last week...."

Now it was her turn to blush...I felt an immediate thrill.. Oh what it was to feel alive...only the murderous bloodsport of ---

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My God,  what idiot hired that intolerable De Montfort? The woman is crazed and half-blind with snobbery. Unless one has featured in last months "Milady's Boudouir" she literally cannot see you. The one time she visited Company House (at the behest of that sniveling dandy D'Arcy ) she tried to hang her parasol on the loyal Emilia's nose!

If asked to cover a High Court Judgement.. that blasted woman will churn out a dissertation on the coarseness of some poor chits ankles.. and this in a serious Journal! My old faithful subscribers must be catatonic with shock!!! Enough is enough!

My beloved publication is being thrown to the wolves in their hunger for circulation.

Returned to my virile manly self!

Sorry.. Sir Hugh Berwick-Stanton here...and out of "character". Bletchley says I have a bare 3 minutes to deliver my report.. so without further ado, here are excerpts from the diary of that dog Geldhabe, carefully filched from his desk by the fragrant Lottie (wink wink!). Bletchley lads on the translation what what! None of this foreign drucker nonsense...

Tuesday 10pm.
Another endless meeting with the Board. I don't know how much longer I can continue working with these idiots!. I, Geldhabe, Bismark's favourite student...compelled to lower myself....

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