Never wash up, send a maid to buy new china!

TIPS TO KEEP YOUR CASTLE SPICK AND SPAN

Whether you are under siege from moths, need to revive an old leather chair or make your candles last longer, Jemima Batty, former head housekeeper at Castle Mould, shares her refreshingly straightforward answers to daily household problems.

■ Before using a hot water bottle for the first time, put a few drops of petrol into it. this will deter guests from smoking in bed.

■ Stop ants getting on your cups and saucers by asking an under-maid to sit inside your kitchen cupboard with a flame-thrower.

■ To Stop a cake going stale, just throw it away and buy a fresh one.

■ Mattresses should be brushed with the soft brush attachment of the vacuum cleaner to pick up skin scales, which we shed at a rate of 1lb per person per year. In a large household which regularly plays host to 40 extra guests a week, many of them aristocrats, that makes upwards of half a ton of skin scales a year. once you have loaded all these scales onto the farm trailer, they may be put to excellent practical use by mixing them with a little water and flour and using the resultant sticky mixture to inject into the walls and ceilings of your farm cottages for insulation.

One of the smaller farm cottages at Castle Mould is insulated entirely from the skin scales of the Marchioness of Mildew, who stayed on at the Castle for six and a half months last year after her train was delayed.

■ Brown shoes should be polished with a banana skin. the rest of the banana — the mushy, edible fruit — should then be poked and prodded inside of each shoe. this makes a nice, moist coating for the foot when the shoeowner comes to put it on, and can prove very welcome should he begin to feel peckish when out on the moor, by which time it should have been reduced to a puree.

■ the best way to make black shoes blacker is to place them at the bottom of a coal scuttle. ■ If a red wine is too young, pour a Maroon matt emulsion paint into it. this gives it a deeper, more acceptable colour.

I always use the farrow & Ball ‘Mature Claret’ range. If guests complain that the red wine tastes a little ‘painty’, then why not disguise the flavour by supplementing it with half a bottle of tomato ketchup?

■ Burnt-on food and scorch marks on baking dishes, egg stains on cutlery and stains on china can all be removed by throwing the offending items away and ordering a new set from a reasonably-priced outlet, such as peter Jones of Sloane Square. ■ In Stately homes, guests come down for breakfast at all times. It is traditional to leave their cooked breakfast on a hotplate on the sideboard — fried, scrambled eggs, mushrooms, toadstools, tomatoes, bacon, sausages, poached hedgehog, woodlice fritters, and, for the more adventurous, black pudding. But how to prevent this magnificent spread becoming too dry by the time the ‘late risers’ appear? a little trick of mine is to pour warm water over it all, or, alternatively, to stick the entire ‘doings’ in a large basin of spring water. ‘I don’t know how on earth you managed to keep my poached hedgehog so deliciously MoISt, Mrs B!’ lord fellowes of Downton remarked to me on his last visit to Castle Mould. little did he know!

■ How does one keep those little holes in Cream Crackers fresh once the packet is opened? the last time Mr Daniel Dyer came to stay at Mould, he passed on a handy tip. you simply line up all the remaining crackers against a wall, shoot at them with cartridges and let all the little pellets ‘do their business’!

■ To Stop eggs cracking when you are boiling them, hold them in a pair of thermodynamic gloves which are able to withstand temperatures above boiling point, and keep hold of them in the boiling water until they are fully ‘done’. ■ A piece of stale cheese left on a saucer in the bedroom overnight will encourage mice and rats to keep away from the bed. to be continued . . .