Novelist Jilly Cooper’s home is an ancient former monastery in the honey-stoned Cotswolds, crammed with animal memorabilia.
Step across the flagstoned hall into the blue drawing room and you enter a museum of curiosities: the baby grand piano is freighted with family photos, the walls book-lined and every surface is busy with ornaments, acquired over four decades, reflecting Jilly’s love for all creatures great and small.
Ceramic greyhounds, elephant cushions, ornamental cats, a pig quintet, galloping horses, a brace of reindeer all jostle for space.
But what’s this? Incongruous in their midst is a framed England football shirt propped against the piano, signed by no less a luminary of the beautiful game than the manager of our national team himself.
‘To Jilly, Congratulations on finishing Tackle! Happy Birthday,’ proclaims Gareth Southgate chummily in an inscription on the shirt.
Jilly’s habitual literary milieu is the upper crust world of the horsy…