I've just been writing a business article about the growth of China's super-rich elite over the past decade.
It comes as no surprise to learn via the San Francisco Chronicle that China is now becoming a major market for British butlers (originally a Bloomberg piece by Colm Heatley, but the pagelink to that is mysteriously, maddeningly unstable). I recall Jonathan Watts of The Guardian, an occasional partner-in-drink out here, wrote a similar piece just before the Olympics. Ah, here it is, on the teaching website One Stop English.
This could be an exciting new opportunity for me. I've always fancied myself as a Jeeves-like model of shrewdness and suavity. Perhaps I should enroll in butler school?
Mind you, it can be a backstabbing profession....
2 comments:
I just started reading the latest in the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde. (Thursday Next is the name of a woman detective in this alternate universe/comic/literary/crime series.) It's called One of Our Thursdays Is Missing; its protagonist manages to acquire a robot butler, named Sprockett. He's a Duplex-5 series robot, which means he lacks full emotional-expression circuitry; in its place, he has a single mechanical eyebrow which functions like an arrowhead, being raised or lowered to point to a range of labels: "Doubtful," "Worried," "Skeptical," and so on.
Rather like Roger Moore - but with a broader range of responses?
Post a Comment