Girls like Diana Spencer, armed with nothing more than a guinea-pig-rearing certificate, proud to say in that old Sloane way that she was 'as thick as two short planks,' became the exception as girls from Benenden and Downe House started to fast-track towards the City and law, consultancy, media and the arts.

Global new money has houses everywhere, and serious helicopters, it doesn't aspire to the Miss Marple life of St. Mary Mead.

Brands are useful ways of short-handing practically anything - look at the way Tom Wolfe first used brand name lists to sharpen up a character and a situation. Look at the most brand-referenced novel, Bret Easton Ellis's 'Glamorama.

London clubland divides itself between the St James's refuge for toffs, and the Conquest of Cool, for the arts and media.

There's no Peter York Foundation, and you're no one without one.

All I'm saying is that Louis Vuitton and L'Oreal didn't invent branding at some point in the mid-Eighties. Big, reassuring names have been around a long time.

Real writers - serious writers with serious subjects, who earn their living at it - all seem to write in small rooms with that knotty-pine 1974 look on the top-floor rear of their houses. Rooms with views.