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(Picture from Sudeley Castle, Winchcombe, Gloucestershire (possible inspiration for Blandings Castle)



Welcome!




From favourite quotes

"I'd always thought her half-baked, but now I think they didn't even put her in the oven"

Jeeves in the Offing (1960)




Finally you have arrived, and even if you should turn out to be an impostor smuggled in
by Uncle Fred or Gally you are truly welcome, as long as your heart is in the right place.

In this my own version of the Gardens of Blandings I'll be trying to present some facts about
the unique literary worlds created by P. G. Wodehouse through his books and stories.
Hopefully in such a way that more people will be encouraged to visit them

I've chosen Blandings as the setting, but contrary to the books, where the different worlds
almost never meet, in these gardens you will be able to meet them all.

To spare dear Clarence undue stress, and to spare you the rigours of meeting Connie,
I will be hosting these pages myself, with good old Beach taking care of the amenities.
And please do take care not to disturb Gally under the Cedar tree during your visit.

My "nom de plum" in some Wodehouse circles is Joss Weatherby, the young Art Director at
Duff & Trotter in the book "Quick Service" where I was pursuing the love of Sally Fairmile.
In real life I've been an ardent Wodehouse fan since my early teens, that means for more than 40 years.

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This page is quite new, and will probably be a work in progress for some time.
Functions and design will be updated/evolved, and more content will be added.





I'm really happy to have been given permission to share this with all of you.
Wodehouse was known to have great respect for his fans, and read all their letters himself.

But perhaps more unusual, he was also known to write replies to most of them, with a small
personal message, and often with an autographed picture included. But sometimes he was even
more personal, as this is a good example of.
It's a picture of himself in his own garden in Remsenburg, New York, with, as he writes himself,
"a very angelic" dog called Minnie.

I wasn't old enough, or brave enough, to write him myself before he died, but know that both I and
many others would have loved to tell him how much we appreciate everything he has given us
and left us. And perhaps we would have been lucky to receive a similar gem of a reply.

But since he is no longer with us, perhaps we can consider this a greeting to us all?


Wodehouse with Minnie in Remsenburg
(Click for full size)





And here is a reply letter I now have in my own collection, written just a few months before he "left for Blandings".
This letterhead was something he probably had made late in life, considering how few have been seen so far.

Letter with a dachs in the letterhead - from 1974
(Click for full size + envelope)













"For Mr. Wodehouse there has been no fall of Man; no "aboriginal calamity." His characters have never
tasted the forbidden fruit. They are still in Eden. The gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden
from which we are all exiled.
... Mr Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity
that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in."

Evelyn Waugh (1961)

And that is the spirit in which the content of this page aspires to be presented.









Copyright © 2014 - Morten Arnesen (a.k.a Joss Weatherby)
Quotes Copyright © the Wodehouse Estate




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