0:04 and where are you going? What do you want? [Music] Hello and welcome to Jiggers's place. And you're looking at me, you're going, "Wait a minute. Where's where's the bow tie and the vest?" as well. You know, this afternoon, this evening, depending on which coast you're on, I'm going to be talking about one of my favorite uh TV shows of all time, Downtown Abbey.
0:40 And you know, I thought about putting on a tuxedo because uh when they dine at home uh uh the Earl of Grantham and and all the other men uh well, at first they dress in in tails, but as they as the show progresses, they end up dressing in tuxedos usually for dinner, but then I thought, you know, let's let's let's do something a little more comfortable. So, I put on my This is a beautiful smoking jacket that I got from what was
1:15 probably the greatest men's store, men's wear store in Los Angeles history, Carol and Company, which unfortunately closed a number of years ago. Uh, you know, I'm gonna give a number of free plugs in in this episode, but uh John Carroll still uh uh maintains a business in Beverly Hills where he does made to measure men's wear. Uh John is a terrific guy. Uh but anyway, this is one of the pieces that I got at Carol and Company. And you know, I when I wear my smoking jacket, I
1:51 have to wear my smoking cap. So, you may look at this and say, "No, no, that's a FEZ." This is actually not a fez. A fez is a little bit different. This is a smoking uh smoking cap. And the way I know that is because uh it says right in here, smoking caps. And this was this is actually uh custom handmade um by a woman named Eliza Jane, who is in England. And if you go on Etsy, you can
2:26 have them made. I actually have several of them in different colors and such. They're so much fun. Uh typically I I I wear my smoking caps uh on Friday night for the Sabbath, whether I'm wearing a suit or uh sometimes even if I'm doing what I what my family and I used to call pajama shabas, uh I'll be in my sweats, but I'll still have I have a a gray um smoking cap. They're lots of fun. They keep you warm. When I checked the weather this morning here in Los Angeles, next week I think we're finally
3:04 getting our autumn weather. Uh there's not going to be a single daytime high um that is not under 70 degrees. So, yay. Finally, the kind of weather I like. And and of course, I'm wearing an ascot, which is, you know, much it's more comfortable than a foreign hand or a bow tie. So, you know, it's just fun. Now, you know, the Earl of Grantham never dresses like this in a show. Uh, but people certainly people u aristocrats
3:40 in the 19th century uh dressed this way. And it was, first of all, when you lived in a place that did not have central heating, uh, a lovely smoking jacket like this kept you warm, as did a smoking cap. And it's very comfortable, very elegant. And, uh, so, so there you go. So, that's why I'm dressed, you know, as my daughter would say, all funny. U, but anyway, so I'm going to first mix up the drawing room. This is the cocktail that Chat GPT and I came up
4:17 with in honor of this show on Downtown Abbey. It is of course a ginbased cocktail because when you think of England and liquor, hopefully you think of gin really there's only two, gin and champagne. The English are, I think, the largest consumers of champagne, interestingly enough, even above the French. So, we're going to start out with a London dry gin. I'm using Brokers. This is just your typical London dry gin. I love this bottle because it's hard. It may be hard to see it. I'll move it a little closer. The
4:52 cap is a bowler hat, which is reminds me of the butler from Downtown Abbey, Carlson, Mr. Carlson. But this is just an it's just a, you know, good old London dry gin. Just great that way. And then it has uh drami which is a scotchbased a scotch whiskey based lure with with herbs and such it I think a little bit of honey in it as I recall. It's a really wonderful elixir is a good word for it. Okay. And then uh
5:28 I've got some freshsqueezed lemon juice and some Earl Grey simple syrup that I made earlier today. This is really simple syrup infused with Earl Grey tea. I use decaf tea, so not that it really matters, I think, for this little amount. But anyway, uh it was some lovely tea that my very dear friend Laura Teasley uh gave me. And then um we're going to use a dash of Angistera Bitters and a dash of Absin.
6:04 This is Lucid Abbisin. I think you will find this available in most places in the United States um where they sell a wide variety of liquor and liquors. Uh people think of absin as a liquor, but it's not. It is a distilled liquor. And and so um for those of you who like me keep kosher, doesn't need to have a certification, just like you know, if if if that's what you hold by, which many uh Jews who keep
6:39 kosher do. Uh but this this is a lovely um it's it's an herb infused uh distilled liquor and and Lucid is quite know now Lucid does happen to have a certification a kosher certification if if that's important to you. Okay. So we're going to start out with 2 oz of gin. Okay, I've got my, by the way, I have my shaker here. Of course, I already have my ice in it. Uh, that that makes it a
7:16 little bit faster. Okay, and then it's going to be a/2 ounce of the next three ingredients. First, a half ounce of drami. Drami has a lovely aroma to it. And then half oouncez of lemon juice. And finally a half ounce of the uh Earl
7:52 grade simple syrup which is already measured out. Okay. And then we're going to put a dash of Angistera bitters in there. Oops. There you go. And a dash of the absin. Okay. And
8:27 I managed to get my glass all covered with bitters. Okay. And now we're going to cover this and we're going to shake. If you got the recipe for the cocktails because you're on my email list, you see it says shake hard. I didn't notice that when I posted the recipe in the email. I'm not sure what shaking hard is because the shaking soft, but in any event, you do want to shake it for a good 20 to 30 seconds. You can see the shaker here is is getting that frosty look on the outside.
9:03 You want to melt a little bit of the water, I mean, a little bit of the ice so that the water opens up the flavors. Okay. And it says to double strain it. I think that's to make sure that you don't get any of the tea leaves in it. I'm I'm not worried about that, frankly. So, I'm going to single strain it. It has a nice color. I'm using a Nickonora glass, but you can use a coupe. Okay. Then, we're going to take a um a lemon twist and going to
9:39 twist it above the cocktail and drop it in for my garnish. And here we go. Lovely, lovely. Okay, see you over on the couch.
10:29 So, here we are. Adjust this a little bit to get that light out of the way. And we have that nice spike of light going over my head, right? It looks very, very dramatic. Okay, so here we are at the end of the week. And you know, if if you're if you follow the Jewish calendar, you're probably thinking to yourself, "Wait a minute, didn't you have two days off this week for the holiday of Sukus?" Yes, I did. And you would think that therefore I would be nice and relaxed and all of that, but yeah, not so much. So, I'm glad that the end of the week is
11:06 nigh, as they say. Wow. This is really good. So, Downtown Abbey when I first heard about Downtown Abbey or when I first became aware of it, I thought it was Downtown Abbey. So, I didn't realize it was Downtown Abbey, but and and Downtown Abbey sounded to me
11:42 like some sort of very violent sort of aggressive show. Um, you know, set in some gritty downtown location and people are being killed or or whatever. and I had no interest in watching it at all. And from time to time, people who knew me would tell me about this show and they
12:17 would tell me about Downtown Abbey, and I just thought, "Oh, they're just mispronouncing it." And they, "You would really love this show. It's so you." And I'm like, okay, you know, I just kind of smile and you know, whatever. So, back in 2018, which by then the original run of the show was done. I was on an airplane. I was flying to see my my dear Marie from I was flying
12:54 from Los Angeles to Birmingham. and I had brought a book to read on the plane and I pulled out the book and I was just kind of like h yeah I don't want to read. So, you know, I I got, you know, the the seatfront things and I'm going through it and I didn't really find anything that I wanted to watch either. And then I saw, oh, they've got Downtown Abbey and I figured, okay, what will it hurt? It's free, you know. And you know, click season one, episode
13:31 one. And for those of you who know the show, there's the opening scene where the Earl of Grantham is walking with his dog and you see the dog's tushy kind of waving. And from that moment on, I was hooked. And every free minute I had between then and when I finished watching the entire, you know, um I forget how many seasons of the show there was. I I was watching Downtown Abbey. And
14:09 since then, I've watched the entire show I don't even know how many times. Probably 10 times, maybe more. And when I when I got back to LA after after that trip, I happened to mention to my very longstanding and close friend Rick and that I had discovered this great show and uh you know gosh, you can tell a great friend because Rick Rick he said to me, oh he said, I envy you having
14:44 discovered the show and watched it from the beginning because I discovered it midway and it just wasn't the same starting in the middle of the show, right? I mean, that's a true friend, right? So, uh, and like I said, I've watched it many times and of course there are fantastic performances. The, of course, the show itself is it's kind of a soap opera, but that's fine. I mean, it's it's a little melodramatic at times. But as as I watched it, I realized that
15:24 this wasn't just historical fiction to give people the opportunity to have a sense of what life was like in the very early part of the 20th century in uh the English countryside primarily. Um, it was really it was really a show about in many ways it's like another of my
16:00 favorite TV shows, Friends, which is a show about relationships. Okay. and and and to this day I I still from time to time watch episodes of Friends because in the end friends is a lesson about how to maintain friendship no matter what happens. And Downtown Abbey is similar with on top of it, I think, an absolutely outstanding social
16:35 message, which perhaps couldn't couldn't be more important than now, which is while money can solve problems, Money cannot prevent you from experiencing pain. It cannot prevent you from having to face the realities of changes in society, from changes in your family, from facing
17:12 one's own need to grow and change. All of these are built into the show. And I think the the best part of the show is who the characters are when they start is not the same as who the characters are when the show ends. And for the characters who really had no no place to which to grow,
17:48 those characters leave the show in one way or another. They die. They leave the show like um Lady Cwley's uh maid um um what's her name? uh O'Brien and I it it it's so apt because if we don't learn and grow, life will shunt us aside.
18:25 It will cease to offer us opportunities. It will give us relationships that will accommodate us by stunting or even well stunting or causing an atrophy to our growth. And that's so contrary to what I would hope we aspire to as as
19:00 people. So to digress for just a minute, uh this past weekend, um I I took a little sort of mini vacation and I booked a room at a hotel in downtown Los Angeles in an area called South Park. You know, warning, another shameless plug. I stayed at the Hawkton Hotel. It's a beautiful boutique hotel that was built in a an off a 100red-year-old office building. Original floors, the original wood plank floors. The outside of the building is
19:37 gorgeous, but the hotel has been beautifully built out inside. The staff is terrific. So nice. It was such a pleasure. And indeed, while you hear about how terrible downtown LA is, and parts of it certainly are, in the vicinity of the hotel, it the the sidewalks were remarkably clean. And I get to my hotel room and I realize I do not have a charger for my phone or Apple Watch. And so I go and ask at the
20:12 desk and uh do you have a charger? No, but there's an Apple store just a three or four blocks up Broadway, which is the street on which the hotel is. So, I I walk up to the Apple store and I'm I end up uh getting a new Apple Watch. And so, while I'm setting up the Apple Watch, uh there was a a young woman setting up actually it was her sister setting up a phone next to me. and we get into a conversation and it turns out that she and her family had come to the United
20:47 States from El Salvador when she was 16. She's now 20. She had just graduated from high school and she's experiencing a lot of anxiety over what she's going to do now. And so I said, so I asked her, well, you know what? What do you what do you think you want to do? and she said, "Well, my sister uh is a receptionist, and I'm thinking maybe I'll do that, or maybe I'll go work in a clothing store." And look, that's honorable work. There's nothing wrong with that. But here's a
21:24 young woman who despite her protestations otherwise spoke beautiful English and Spanish of course coming from El Salvador h had a very outgoing charming personality. She has so much opportunity, so much more opportunity than, you know, working as a retail clerk in, I don't know, a clothing store or something like that. So, I said to her, "Have you ever thought about getting into, I don't know, something like
22:00 corporate sales?" I said, "For example, you you you told me you you want to travel. Why not get a job where part of the job entails travel? So, and the first company that leapt to mind for me was Embraar, which is a a a corporate jet uh aircraft company. They sell commercial jets as well, small small commercial jets. I said, you know, a company like that, they need uh salespeople who are bilingual. They do a lot of business in South America. I
22:35 I said if I were you, I'm I would probably look into Ambry and see if they need salespeople. And both fortunately and unfortunately, it never occurred to her, I think, that she could do something like that. And she even said to me, "I could do something like that." And I said, "I don't see why not." I said, look, I said, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it'll be easy. Be a lot of hard work,
23:11 but I said, you know, top salespeople for a company like Emra probably make a million dollars a year, literally. And it was it was for me as as a guy who turned out was you know three times her age. It was an opportunity for me to help her see that if if she would invest herself in growing to a large extent the world was her her oyster. And I got an opportunity to speak to her sister too. Uh what just
23:49 lovely lovely young women and uh before they left they introduced me to their mother. She's much gusto much senora. Your daughters are just wonderfully lovely young women. And much to my surprise, not only did they shake my hand, but they gave me a hug, you know, before before they left. And and I was talking to a friend of mine about this earlier today. I I I I hope I I don't know. Who knows? But I hope that somehow maybe they got a glimpse into
24:24 an a a world that was that was not as limited as perhaps they had perceived before we met because we all have this opportunity. The world is never as limited as we've got it in our head that it is because we're all so intimately familiar with our faults that we we can't see that they don't need to hold us back. At least not as much as we think they do. And so going back to
25:01 Downtown Abbey, Downtown Abbey does the same thing. So, uh, for example, when Mrs. Patmore gets an inheritance, right? Mrs. Patmore probably was originally raised to think that look the the the the best thing you can aspire to is what's called service meaning working as a servant and to become the the cook in a household as grand as
25:38 Downtown Abbey. That alone is a tremendous accomplishment. But then she gets this inheritance and she's trying to figure out what she should do with it. And she ends up opening a bed and breakfast or what is the equivalent of a bed and breakfast, right? Her horizons open up over the course of the show, right? The the character of Lady Cibil, the youngest daughter of the Cwley family, right? She epitomizes this when
26:13 she helps I I can't remember the name of the housemaid, but she helps the housemaid uh take a correspondent a secretarial correspond. Well, she doesn't help her take the correspondence course. The the housemate takes the correspondence course, but Cibil, Lady Cibil, helps her get a job as a secretary and leaves service, right? uh because she believes that people can aspire to greater things than where they start out. And and interestingly enough,
26:49 this is why she ends up marrying the chauffeur, right? So, uh Tom I'm I'm going up on some of these names. Uh yeah, Tom Branson. Branson, right? He's a chauffeur, right? But he has it in his head, maybe not before he meets Lady Cibil, but when he meets her and falls in love with her and realizes his life will never be better than if he can
27:26 convince Lady Cibil to be his wife. He realizes he needs to be able to grow beyond being a chauffeur. Right? This is one of the great lessons of of male female relations is it used to be quite frequent that the woman that a man loved inspired him to be more than he otherwise would have thought himself capable of being.
28:02 I'm gonna let that sink in for a minute. You may say to yourself, "Gosh, what a little boy thing to think and do." Yeah, kind of. Kind of. But on the other hand, to inspire a man to seek his full potential, what a wonderful thing. What a meaningful aspect in a
28:39 relationship, by the way. Not to browbeat him, to be more than he's capable of being, to inspire him. And Lady Cibil, I think, inherently understood that even as she grappled with giving up the life she had known since her birth, right? Lady Cibil, if if she were going to be uh uh brought onto a Navy ship, uh
29:18 you would hear the the Bose's pipe and then and you would hear the bell rung, ding ding, ding, ding. Kindness arriving, right? All Lady Cibil cared about was helping other people. And I think by the way that was why un you know tragically within the show she she died was because where was she going to go from there? She was the epitome of herself essentially from the get-go. Right? And where was Tom going to grow from
29:54 there? Right? And so Tom being on his own and having to learn that these people that he had here to for looked at as being bad if not evil were actually not bad or evil. They were good people. They were raised in a different context than the one in which he was raised. and in their in their from their perspective they were trying to do their best as well.
30:29 So that's another lesson coming from Downtown Abbey and I think one that's important for all of us. There's a lot of of societal envy going on uh in the United States certainly but I but maybe to a larger extent in the Western world and that's unfortunate. my exper and and I was raised to buy into that. Oh, all wealthy people got there by cheating, by taking advantage of other people. But when I started to when I started to be
31:06 around people who were much wealthier than I was and I got to know them as as actual people as opposed to caricatures and I saw the kind of challenges they had and I saw the kind of things they did to serve their communities. I realized people are people. The fact that people have more money or maybe were born with more money, that doesn't make them good or bad. What makes them good or bad is their values and how they exercise those values.
31:44 But merely because somebody does or does not have money, there is that is no moral impremature one way or the other. And it's a big mistake to believe that that's the case. And it only can make our lives smaller if we believe that because it means that we're cutting ourselves off from opportunity, from relationships that may be quite fulfilling. And I don't necessarily mean just professionally or financially fulfilling. I mean emotionally
32:20 fulfilling. The idea that because someone is wealthy or famous that somehow the the you know, God forbid, the death of a loved one doesn't affect them the same way it does for someone who who doesn't have financial means is colossally wrong. I'll say uh so those those are those are sort of some lesson other lessons. So all people feel pain, right? If you look at the character of
32:57 Lady Edith, the middle daughter, she feels the pain of not being as beautiful as her older sister, Lady Mary, and not being as lovely a human being as her younger sister, Lady Cibil. And she doesn't know what to do with that pain. and she convinces herself that her father doesn't love her as much as he loves his other two daughters, which of course is not true, but it's
33:33 it's the it's the mindset we can easily into which we can easily put ourselves. And so Edith too has to grow. She has to find her way. Uh she learns to drive, right? and and she learns this new skill which on the one hand is great but on the other hand leads her to you know do things with a married man that she ought not to be doing right causes strife in his marital life. Uh
34:11 the character is uh uh yeah, Timothy Drew, right? And and she has to grow beyond that and she ends up having an opportunity to write for the magazine. And she falls in love with the editor who of course falls in love with her as well. and she endures the pain of him disappearing and not knowing for years what happened to him even as she gets pregnant out of wedlock which now
34:48 of course nobody would care about that. Uh but in at the time was you know very very deeply against the social moors of the day. She has a daughter that she loves that her family convinces well not her family but her her aunt convinces her she has to give up and she goes through the pain of giving up her child. And then when she decides to or or well she goes through the pain of first deciding to give up her child then
35:23 realizing she can't. And so then she goes through the pain of in essence allowing the child to be adopted by the Drews and the pain of seeing the child every day but not being able to be the child's loving mother and the pain of essentially being told by Mrs. Drew Barl Drew. She can't see the child anymore and feeling she can't disclose what's going on.
35:58 Is that pain any less real for her than it would be for you or I who don't aspire to anything like the wealth? Although I dress a little bit like the Earl of Grantham maybe. And what about the Earl of Grantham himself who has to sit idly by while younger men go off to fight World War I which especially at that time in England, in France, in Italy, the vast majority of people felt was a
36:33 just war, a just cause fighting the the Kaiser and Americans in general too were on the side of the allies. He wants to go serve king and country, but there's no place for him. He's made Lord lieutenant and he thinks and I'm sorry, he's made colonel a colonel of the regiment and he thinks he's going to go to France to fight and he realizes it's just honorary. And in the meantime, he watches as his wife becomes essentially
37:10 the director of the rehabil rehabilitation facility that his house becomes. He sees his daughter Edith drive. He sees his daughter Cibil become a nurse. And meanwhile, all he can do is dress up in his uniform and feel rather useless. Do you think the pain of Lord Grantham feeling useless is any less deep than the pain we feel when we
37:45 feel useless or overlooked? We're kidding ourselves if if that's the case. Everyone feels pain. money, position, fame, they do not inoculate us against feeling pain. And if we truly want to be well-developed, good people, emotionally mature people, we need to recognize and have empathy
38:21 for anyone who's feeling pain. Let's see what are some I made some notes here on some of the other ones. Um oh so England in contrast to America was not known for its social mobility and in fact my favorite character in Downtown Abbey is Tom Branson. He goes through the most change. And to his absolute credit as a
38:57 character, because he loves Lady Cibil so deeply, he realizes he has to come to understand and even to love the members of her family. And in doing so, he becomes much wiser, a much better person, even as he struggles with wanting to stay true to his values as a socialist and and all these kind of things.
39:34 Tom is the epitome of social mobility even as he doesn't really think that there's any merit in being socially mobile and the good he does by taking on the role of for example becoming the agent for the estate. It not only facilitates his growth but it helps a staunch traditionalist
40:10 like the dowature countis right Violet to also realize and come to terms with what we here in America call social mobility. Right. And you c you can see that Tom is kind of at the forefront of that uh that aspect of English society, right? The the housemmaid that I
40:46 mentioned that Lady Cibble whom Lady Cibil helps to get a job. She's being socially mobile, right? Thomas the the footman who eventually becomes the butler of down at Downtown Abbey. He chafes under his inability to be socially mobile. So as and by the way although it's not addressed directly in the show
41:23 the aristocracy in England was a phenomenon of social mobility centuries before the aristocracy didn't exist in England in the year whatever 500 100 right the aristocracy started to be built at the time of William the conqueror right so it's really the pace of social mobility that changed in England as opposed to the reality of it always being here essentially in America
42:00 there's other fantastic lessons my next favorite character after Tom Branson is the Daitcher countis. Um I'm going up on the name of the actress who plays her. Uh she is beyond brilliant and uh and Violet as she's known to the crawlies, right? So she is
42:35 the embodiment of the value of humor repeatedly intense situations. Aunt Violet makes a droll remark, sometimes to the irritation of her son, Lord Grantham, but always to the betterment of the situation. And it is her abil um uh there's there's a great scene where with between her and
43:10 and Branson where she's explaining to him something about how titles work and and Branson says we're none of this makes sense and she says to him oh if you're looking for logic don't look at the English nobility right I mean it's it's a brilliant remark 100% accurate very self-deprecating at a certain level and clearly meant to set this young man at his ease as she deals with the reality that like
43:46 it or not she Tom Branson is now a member of the Cwley family and she can fight it and end up alienating herself or She can seek to build a relationship and she seeks the best choice which is to build the better choice which is to build a relationship. Uh and her droll humor gives her the opportunity to on the one hand speak her mind on the
44:21 other hand to disarm people who otherwise may be at loggerheads. And uh Maggie Smith is the actress uh Dom Maggie Smith by the way because she was she was kned uh is brilliant in doing that in the show. And the other I think quality that Aunt Violet shows is how
44:57 important it is for people to be humble. And that may seem for those of you who know the show that may seem strange and Violet humble. Yes, she is fundamentally she is a humble human being and she does want good. Yes, she believes in her for one of a better term rights as the Dowature countest and before that the countest of Grantham,
45:33 but she doesn't want them at the expense of other people. She wants to raise the tide. We can see this when in the whole instance of the uh flower show. And we can see it even better when her I believe it's a letter opener ends up missing. And at first she accuses the assistant
46:08 gardener of having stolen it. because she can't find it. And as she analyzes this situation, he's the only one that would have had an opportunity to have taken it. And is there anyone watching this who can legitimately claim that they've never misjudged someone? No, of course not. We all misjudge people. And when she finds out that she's wrong,
46:46 what happens? Well, Mrs. Cwley, Matthew Cwley's mother, comes to castigate her for having fired the assistant gardener and on and on and on and how she not only needs to rehire him, but she needs to apologize to him. and and what a terrible person she is for not having done this. And what does lady Lady Violet do? She asks her butler to have the assistant gardener come in. And she just asked him, uh, what was the conversation we had earlier today? And
47:24 the assistant gardener says, "Well, uh uh uh Lady Violet or Lady uh the the the countess calls her. She let me know that I I I could have my job back and she apologized for having misjudged me." Right. a countessager countest who can apologize
47:59 to someone of a vastly lower social status in England of the early 20th century could only do that if fundamentally she was a humble human being. a human being who actually cares about other people. That's what Aunt Violet, that's who Aunt Violet is, that is the lesson that we can learn from her. No matter how much
48:37 self-righteousness we in which we wrap ourselves, we've got to be able to take a step back and with humility admit when we've made a mistake or when we've harmed another person, apologize to them. I want to uh wrap up this show with a couple of other thoughts. things that are, I think, overlooked, if not outright unpopular
49:12 today. And it gets back to why I'm all dressed up like this. I don't think we value good manners and beauty the way these things used to be valued. And it's a shame. I remember having someone who was in a pi position of authority um in in the in the religious community in which I live tell me that manners are just the way
49:48 people uh who think they're of a higher social status put down other people. That's not true. Someone who is well-mannered is someone who is looking after the well-being of other people. And uh if you recall again for those of you who've seen the show, there is my absolute favorite scene in the show where uh Tom Branson is having dinner with the
50:25 family and he doesn't have tails to wear. So he's wearing just his regular suit. and a young man who at one time maybe probably still does uh thought he was going to be able to marry Lady Cibil is at the dinner with his father and Tom starts rather aggressively uh talking about some political ideas
51:02 that he has in a very aggressive way and Lord Lord Grantham gets very upset about it and it's it becomes increasingly clear that this is not the Tom Branson that they know. It's just not like him. And uh Lady Mary realizes that somebody spiked his drink and that basically he's he's drunk out
51:39 of his head and and that's why his inhibitions are weighed down and that's why he's doing what he's doing. And it turns out that this young man spiked his drink to embarrass him. What a filthy thing to do, right? And the young man's father stands up and he says to Tom Branson,
52:14 "I apologize for my family and my son unreservedly. He claims no mitigating circumstances." That is the epitome of good manners. Whatever that man may have thought about a chauffeur, marrying a countess's immaterial, one human being does not treat another human being that
52:50 way. And since a member of his family did that as the leader of his family, it was incumbent upon him to apologize. It's such a great moment in the show. Good manners are essential if we want to live lives not dominated by stress and anxiety. And then finally,
53:27 beauty. for all of the difficulties of life at Downtown Abbey, for all of the difficulties of life in the English countryside and for that matter in London. Everyone from Daisy, who starts out as the kitchen maid and eventually becomes the assistant cook to Lord Grantham strives to bring beauty into people's lives.
54:05 Indeed, part of the value of being in service for the servants is to live in a beautiful home, to live in the beautiful English countryside. Not flashy, ostentatious beauty. The quiet beauty of people treating each other appropriately, of appreciating the natural beauty of the countryside,
54:42 of appreciating a sense of of history and of living together and everyone doing their best to treat other people with decency. And that's why periodically I go back to Downtown Abbey because I value beauty in our lives. So perhaps I've convinced you to give a second thought to being well-mannered,
55:17 to building beauty in our lives. And if I do, here's to you. So, thank you so much for joining me on this episode of Jiggers's Place. I wish you a wonderful rest of the afternoon, evening, and look forward to seeing you next week. And signing off as I do to my dear dear
55:52 Marie who I think would have wholeheartedly agreed with all the things I talked about because she was such a lovely mannered woman who loved beauty and music, beauty and nature. Marie darling, you are my bell. Courage at all times my friends.