Dressing for a Damp, Cool Autumn Day. . .

Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird, it's a plane, it's. . . Bertie Wooster?

Nothing like tweed, corduroy, and a pair of vintage 'Phi Bates' brogues by the Bates shoe company on a chilly, wet mid-October afternoon. Besides the cheap IKEA umbrella, the ensemble pictured above includes a tweed hacking jacket by Hart, Schaffner, and Marx (made in the U.S. of A. and featuring a functioning boutonnière hole and leather buttons), the old Phi Bates shoes (still in remarkable condition given their presumed age***), and a hand-printed and unlined wool Ravetz necktie made in Great Britain. . . all worn with a pair of Land's End corduroy pants, a Ralph Lauren oxford cloth button-down collar shirt, and a tweed vest whose precise provenance escapes me at the moment.

My wife remarked that I had a jaunty look going today when she snapped this picture on the front walk of our schloss, and, indeed, jaunty I felt when I dressed this morning. All very fitting since tomorrow (Wedenesday) is P. G. Wodehouse's birthday. Sadly, I lack a gentleman's personal gentleman the caliber of Jeeves, so I'll have to pack and load up the ol' two-seat roadster myself for the trip down to Totleigh Towers later today. Hopefully, neither Madeline Bassett, Honoria Glossop, nor Bobbie Wickham will be lying in wait once I've arrived.

-- Heinz-Ulrich

*** The Bates Footwear company still produces military and police footwear, but civilian shoes have not been manufactured since the early 1960s, making my shoes at least 5o years old, if not older than that.

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Up North Style. . .

Bad Dad makes a friend. YMP and Bad Dad on the shores of Lake Michigan. Or was that Crystal Lake? The Grand Duchess takes a selfie in her kayak. How NOT to impress the girls sunning themselves along the river. YMP and Bad Dad kayaking on the Platte River headed toward Loon Lake. J ust back from a week in Northern Michigan in a charming and spacious house on the banks of the Betsie River outside of Thompsonville. A largely pleasant seven days despite some challenging episodes with the Young Master, who has picked up some very questionable habits and language from his friends in the 8th Grade during the school year just ended. But otherwise, we enjoyed ourselves and contemplated remaining for a few days longer since the house was available. In the end, we decided to return home as planned originally since neither my wife, nor I wanted to spend the remaining days chained to our computers in Zoom meetings from our vacation destination. I actually managed to leave the laptop and ip

Mid-June Thursday Style. . .

A nother pretty typical variation on the theme for late spring, summer, and very early fall. I'm a huge fan of Madras and have several such shirts in the seasonal rotation. Lightweight, exceedingly comfortable, and even dressy when pressed and tucked in, which is the usual way of things here at Totleigh in the Wold. Now, if I had my druthers, I'd still rather be skiing the trails in the upper half of "The Mitten" (of Michigan), in the Upper Peninsula, or Ontario. But summers ain't so bad either, and I'd look pretty funny walking around in cross-country ski attire during June. -- Heinz-Ulrich

A Lazy Saturday at the End of June. . .

A sleepy first half of the weekend here at Totleigh. Warmer and quite humid ahead of an approaching cool front here in Mid-Michigan. Perfect for yet another pair of chino shorts an a seersucker shirt -- tucked in of course -- with the usual leather deck shoes and ribbon belt. Otherwise, not much accomplished beyond a page or so of writing and monkeying around with audio settings for an upcoming podcast episode. However, I was not completely useless yesterday! I made a huge fruit salad for dinner, which the Grand Duchess and I enjoyed a short while later at the table on the back porch. The Young Master, as is his wont on Saturday evenings, took his dinner on a tray in the TV room upstairs where he whiled away a couple of hours on Flight Simulator, flying some sort of commercial airliner to some destination across the Atlantic or Pacific. I would have loved that sort of technology at about nine or 10 way back during the late 1970s, aka The Stone Age. As it is, my sister and

Classic Style

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