There are upper class ways to start a newspaper article, and then there's this:
The most Daily Telegraph intro of all time
The article was written by William Cash, owner of the Upton Cressett stately home in Shropshire.
And it is all about how hard it is to hire staff for stately homes these days, after the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge placed an advert in The Lady to find staff for their own Anmer Hall home in Norfolk.
Cash recalls some of the mishaps his staff have committed, including:
After I specified that a Redwood & Feller navy wool suit should be sent to the dry cleaner, I later saw to my horror the trousers and jacket hanging on the line to dry. They'd been put in the washing machine and were ruined. In her defence, our housekeeper told me she'd never heard of 'dry cleaning'.
But the last straw for that particular worker was this:
The final straw was when I asked her to put up some Christmas decorations and she decorated the holly hanging above various paintings - including a rare portrait of Charles II by Adriaen Hanneman - with gold spray paint. Specialist restorative work had to be done to remove the glitter paint from the canvas.
You just can't get the staff these days.