Captain Moonlight: Curtain calls

NOW, this vexing question of why people don't draw their curtains at night in London's more self-regarding neighbourhoods. Answers have been coming in all week, no doubt attracted by my offer of Windolene (and champagne) for the most convincing explanation. Many of you wrote of the difficulty of getting ruches right again, and the deep creases that occur in tied-back curtains.

Mr House of Wimbledon identified it as peculiar to Norman Lamont - whose practicelaunched our inquiry - and other luminaries who feel that to draw curtains is to end the play and invite 'the shadows of anonymous retirement'.

Mr Langley of Bristol, writing 'as a lifelong member of the curtain-drawing classes', puts it down to a pushy middle-class desire to draw attention to one's lifestyle, distinguishing between Lupin Pooter, an obvious undrawer, and his father, a certain drawer. 'This was fully appreciated by the lower orders,' adds Mr Langley, 'who as late as the 1920s and 1930s knew one upwardly mobile suburb of Nottingham as 'Dinner- At-Eight-With-The-Blinds-

Up'.' MissSimpson of Worthing reported that in Lancashire villages the only time front rooms were ever curtained was 'to conceal illicit nooky on the settee'. Makes you proud to be a Lancastrian.

And still we waited for an answer from Holland Park. But Frances Lindsey-Clark of Battersea has a friend there who says it's because the windows are so big that no one can afford curtains that go all the way. That sounds right. Windolene and the rest all round, I say.