Classic Style

H appy 2017 everyone!  Do you have any particular resolutions for the new year?  Here are some of mine in no particular order: 1) Exercise more routinely. 2) Achieve a better work-life balance. 3) Read more fiction. 4) Enjoy, somehow, more free time. 5) Play more. 6) Spend more time with the Grand Duchess ad Young Master. 7) Listen to BBC Radio 4 online for at least 30 minutes everyday. 8) Do a better job of following world and domestic news and events. 9) Be more patient. 10) Listen to and play more music. 11) Make a tiny difference in someone's life. 12) Continue dressing with classic flair and style, or at least attempting to do so. Small things, really, but all things I'd like to do more of in the coming 12 months.  What about you? -- Heinz-Ulrich

One of my guilty pleasures is collecting Victorian and Edwardian images of Father Christmas.  I hope you might agree that this is one of the loveliest and most magical. M erry Christmas from all of us here at Classic Style! -- Heinz-Ulrich, The Grand Duchess, and The Young Master

  The first of two photographs today, taken just after the school bus departed at about 8:35am. A frigid day here at Totleigh-in-the-Wold.  Perfect weather for the pajama day they have decided to have today at our son's elementary school!  I kid you not.  Now, I like the teachers and administration at our son's school.  They have been most helpful, accommodating, and inclusive where our son is concerned during the last year.  But you can't help but wonder when messages are emailed/sent home about stuff like this.  And let's just forget for a moment that the very idea of pajama day runs counter to what I consider the dictates of good taste.  Sigh.  In any case, the weather is just how we like it in our neck o the wood.  Cold, snowy, Norwegian sweater weather.  Come to think of it, I'll wear one for my 2pm meeting on campus later this afternoon. -- Heinz-Ulrich And the second.  The snow is so cold that it squeaks underfoot.  Our hi

  My maternal grandfather, Dave, as a young paratrooper.  'Granddaddy' was originally an anti-aircraft gunner in a Pennsylvania German battery that guarded the Dutch refineries on Curacao in the Caribbean for a while .  I believe this photograph was taken shortly after he had completed jumpschool at Fort Benning, Georgia before shipping out for Great Britain sometime in 1944 and later France.  A soft-spoken and gentlemanly soul, he actually volunteered for both paratrooper and glider training!  Amazingly, he lived to tell the tale. My late grandmother, Vivian, or 'Granny' as my sister, cousins, and I called her.  I believe this photograph was taken around about the same time as my grandfather's above.  The two photographs were always displayed together in a hinged frame that I finally replaced a few years ago, so we could hang the two photographs on the wall more easily. My grandfather's parents, Myrtle and Tom, or 'Mother and Daddy Stokes'

Mind your manners (table and otherwise) this holiday seasons, gents! T he holiday season is once more upon us, and with it the annual lead-up the rather frenetic Christmas and New Year's period.  While I naturally hope that regular and occasional visitors to Classic Style will have to good graces NOT to show up to any special holiday dinners or other events dressed in hoodies, sweatpants, sagging jeans, and flip-flops or sneakers -- or, frankly, any other common attire of the sort -- this post is not about that. Nope.  Instead, it's a yearly reminder to average guys everywhere to remember and practice polite table manners.  Not just on special occasions either, but everyday.  With that idea in mind, here is a reprise of a post from November of 2012 (with a few small recent edits by yours truly), which presents all kinds of useful tabletop information, most of which used to be common knowledge.  At least in my particular dimension.  Sadly, however, that ver