Envy, Hair, Stuff

 'I envy you, ' said the man who had come up to my café table on purpose to apprise me of the fact. What in particular did he envy, I wondered: it could be anything from the jacket potato I was about to devour to my all-round fabulouslness. But no – it was my hair. He himself, a man of similar age to me, had the usual cropped hair disguising extensive loss, whereas I have at present rather alarmingly luxuriant locks. I discovered recently that my hair (which has never shown serious signs of thinning) had changed its ways, becoming wavier and growing in new directions, with the result that I now seem to be able to let it grow unchecked without turning into an Albert Einstein lookalike. The man, who was South African, had much to say on the subject of hair and its loss, among other things, while my knife and fork hovered expectantly over that appetising baked potato.  Eventually he went. In my new hirsute condition, I guess I'll have to get used to this kind of thing. It makes a change from being told I'm the image of Jimmy Stewart, or Ian McKellen, or whoever. 
  The café in question was at Calke Abbey in Derbyshire, which I was visiting with my cousin. It's a fascinating place, a rare example of a house taken over by the National Trust when far along the road to dereliction and, instead of being spruced up and sanitised, maintained in something like the condition it was in when the family, having sealed up most of its many, many rooms, finally abandoned the place altogether. The rooms now open to the public are, for the most part, more like cluttered lumber rooms filled with miscellaneous junk than the neatly presented rooms of the standard stately home – which is refreshingly different, and gives an unusually comprehensive view of the kind of more or less mundane things a large country house might have contained. However, with the blinds down to keep out destructive light, the result is a depressing gloom and, most of the time, a sense of being oppressed – oppressed by all that stuff. I was glad to be outside again, wandering in the extensive and rather beautiful grounds. 
  The stuff in the house includes large numbers of stuffed animals and birds, mounted trophy heads, and cabinets full of specimens. These represent a mere fragment of the natural history collection left behind by the obsessive collector Sir Harpur Vauncey Crewe, who used his vast wealth to amass a hoard that was said to be second in size only to the more systematic, properly curated collections of the 2nd Baron Rothschild at Tring (which included 300,000 bird skins, 20,000 birds' eggs, 300,000 beetles and two and a half million mounted butterflies and moths). The eccentric Sir Vauncey was so fixated on his precious collections that he ordered fires to be maintained day and night in every room of Calke Abbey, the family seat in Derbyshire, to maintain ideal conditions. Any servant who failed in this duty was issued with an immediate dismissal notice, but as Sir Vauncey hardly knew one servant from another, these were usually ignored. One of his staff, however, was his constant companion – the head gamekeeper, the gloriously named Agathos Pegg, with whom Sir Vauncey would go on collecting expeditions on his extensive estates. Once, when the unlikely pair were collecting butterflies near Repton Park, a house occupied by one of the Harpur Crewe cousins, there was an altercation of some kind, following which Sir Vauncey ordered that Repton Park be razed to the ground, which it duly was...
  But now I must go and comb my hair.