Panshanger House, Hertfordshire, 1806 - 1954
Postcard view, circa 1904
Collection of the Author

A few of the stately homes depicted in my extensive collection of postcards still stand (Sandringham, Knebworth) but most of them, like Lady Desborough's beloved Panshanger, have been demolished.  And really, isn't a picture of something you can't ever go and see more interesting than a place anyone can take snapshots of and post on Flickr? Seriously, and I'm not alone in this: I had fierce competition while bidding on the Foots Cray I shared with you yesterday, and I have lost out on more than one Panshanger.  The present example wasn't cheap; or at any rate not cheap by postcard standards.  Plus it just arrived in time for Christmas. 

As you know I had considered expanding my collecting to include personal items like a stocking of a certain duchess.  But I'm over that now.  I'd probably still go for the socks of a duke, but he'd have to be wearing them.

Why, a friend called to ask last night.  Seriously, why?  Why this interest in the lost and gone?  I say first of all, because who doesn't find the end of something -- the end of empire, for example, or a way of life -- compelling?  Fin de siecle is part of it.  Memento mori too.  But I think there's comfort in knowing nothing lasts.  It's a sad truth perhaps, but liberating.  Even my own humble childhood home on goggle earth is nothing now but a faint arc of driveway and a ring of trees to mark the spot.  Nothing to go and see.  No reason, in other words, to go back. 

Humphry Repton, successor to Capability Brown and the last of the great English landscape designers, laid out the grounds of Panshanger.  The gravel excavation company that bought the property was careful, after razing the house, not to completely obliterate Repton's work and the views he created.  Of course, neither you nor I can really see what Lady Desborough would have seen from the windows of her rooms at Panshanger.  What we can imagine, however, is still interesting, but a step or two removed from the original.  Which is not to say that a step back is always a bad thing either.  You get perspective.    

"I only like English people in books," a friend of mine announced the other day, having had an especially unpleasant encounter with a real one.  I don't entirely disagree, at least about people in general, although I am very fond of a few of them.  There are times when I think I prefer the people and places in books and pictures as opposed to the up close and personal kind.  It's not that reality is overrated or harsh, but rather that there are levels to it.  There's the reality of what's in front of you and the reality that no longer exists except in your mind or else at a very great distance in time or space.  There's the level of what was, a long time ago, and then there's what is, in the very insistent Now.  There are lessons to be learned from both, I suppose.  It isn't always the same lesson, either.  There's what you see and I see.  Sometimes when there's nothing left to look at.