This is the first Persephone Letter on our new website. We keep telling each other that getting a new site up and running is exactly like moving house (indeed a rereading of The New House is called for) but it has been totally exhausting and even slices of cucumber on our eyes, had we time to lay them on, would not help. But every day is better, fewer and fewer mistakes come to light and in another week or two all should be running smoothly. Please continue to tell us what you like and don’t like – it’s useful. Already we miss the word ‘fortnight’, but we have abandoned it for two reasons: people outside the UK do not seem to use it and some indeed do not know what it means; and our website designer thinks it keeps the site fresher if we write more briefly and more often rather than in one fell swoop every two weeks …

So we are still in a glow from our weekend at Goddards, which you can rent from The Landmark Trust here, however it has to be a special occasion – a one hundredth book or a special birthday or a retirement – because it is far from cheap. But it was totally worth it as we had a really splendid time. Here, briefly, is what we did: on Friday everyone arrived off the train from Waterloo – thank you Dorking taxis for your brilliant ferrying; too late we realised we should have rented this old Greenline Bus:

and we had Prince Charles’s sausages and Waitrose plum tart for supper. On Saturday we did this walk up to the top of Leith Hill and tried to see ten counties, well we managed seven, which included London on one side and the English Channel to the other:

After kedgeree for lunch, some of us slept, others went to a jumble sale and came back with amazing clothes (Olivia2 is wearing her glamorous boiled wool jacket as I write). We skipped tea because we knew we were having early supper in honour of Urmila Seshagiri who had come straight from her conference (where she gave a paper about us as part of the ‘Publishing, Cultural Value and the Arts of the Present’ symposium) to imbibe the atmosphere of Lutyens and Bloomsbury-in-Surrey before flying home. She had to endure some lecturettes about Lutyens, Darwin and the Worms, The Battle of Dorking and Forster, but seemed to take it in good spirit. Then we fed her roast chicken and braised chicory and rhubarb crumble, talked to her about – what else? – the Canon,  and she caught a cab back to Dorking Station and thence, the next morning, to Tennessee. Next morning Olivia1 cooked and at lunchtime we welcomed several ex-Persephone girls, David and Sue Gentleman, Keith and Sandy Pickering (owner of the Miss Pettigrew copyright) and Jane Brocket. The Pickerings gave us a framed copy of one of the original drawings for Miss Pettigrew, this is now hanging in the shop; Jane gave us a hundred tulip bulbs for the garden; and we were given other wonderful presents.  The sun shone all afternoon, a Persephone cake was produced (it’s on our Facebook page) and, we think, a great time was had by all. After tea in the garden everyone left except three of us; we had supper round the small round table in the sitting room. Then hot baths (Lutyens, or someone, had designed them incredibly deep and luxurious) and we slept soundly in our room on the first floor here:

Then we tidied up and on Monday morning went back to the shop, all in all well and truly birthday’d.

So now we await delivery of the new Biannually and Catalogue next week, we start selling books no. 99 and 100 (which are reviewed in the Guardian this Saturday), we redo the shop window in order to fit in the wedding dress used in the filming of The Making of a Marchioness and an oil painting of The Bombed Out Street by Hilda Davis  (recently bought for the shop from Sim Fine Art);  and finally we shall display the limited edition Emma Bridgewater bowl and jug and hope other people find them as beautiful as we do. Ditto with our newly-planted winter-flowering pansies in our window boxes: 

Nicola Beauman

59 Lambs Conduit Street

WC1N 3NB