I don’t particularly follow the crowd. My tastes are pretty unique. It’s not something that bothers me, especially now. Becoming comfortable in your skin is just ageing.

Take television. For example, a very popular show in the UK is The Apprentice. I find this pretty offensive – the notion that financial gain is the be-all-and-end-all. So, I buck the trend. Another example, I can’t be bothered with your typical Saturday night fodder, so a lot of programmes I’ve simply never seen. These shows are just low-budget, low-quality tv.

The other day I watched a re-run of the first few episodes of Downton Abbey. I think this aired for the first time between 2010-2015. Ish. But they missed me completely. I suppose, at that time, I was finishing up up in London, up in Liverpool, then trying to get the bike mechanic venture off the ground. So I was pretty busy. Not to mention all the grief with daughter was brewing up nicely.

I’d certainly heard of it, I knew it was a massive production, but I never watched. So I’m a bit late to the party. It was the same when I caught up with Brideshead Revisited (originally aired in the Eighties) a few years ago. And with Downton Abbey, I’m pretty impressed. Of course this upstairs/downstairs thing is absolutely disgusting, but, you know, it happened. So I suppose a vaguely accurate portrayal of the time – it is only a hundred years ago, after all.

So on the strength of these episodes, I’ve just ordered the box-set of every episode, and, really, you can count in years when I last bought a dvd. Let’s hope that the next fifty-odd episodes live up to the standard.

Oh, and note to readers – there really is a place called Downton, in fact it is a village not far from me. But it has no abbey. In the series, the house is actually Highclere Castle (still only thirty or forty miles away) and the “town” filming looks very much like the Cotswolds. The story, though, is entirely fictional, and set up in Yorkshire.